Painted in the warm, dreamy palette of the golden linen era, this 1942 card captures Chapultepec Castle shimmering above its lake in Mexico City's great forest park — Monterey cypress trees trailing in the foreground, the neo-classical palace pale against a blazing sunset sky, poplar rows reflected in still water. But the back of this card crackles with wartime urgency: the writer, Walt, postmarks it from Brownsville, Texas on October 9, 1942, explaining to the Ackley family in Holland, New York that he is headed to the Panama Canal to repair business machines — emphatically not in the army — and is about to board a plane the next morning for a 1,200-mile jump down the Mexican coast. The one-cent green "For Defense / Industry-Agriculture" stamp is a quintessential WWII home-front issue, Scott #899, and the contrast between the tranquil castle scene and Walt's adventure-tinged message makes this a genuinely compelling piece of American wartime ephemera. Photo by William Berlin Goolsby.