NEIGHBORS / SHORT TAKES : Postcard Art : A Ventura baker who wishes to showcase local talent seeks submissions for his series.

George Keenen, owner of Ventura’s City Bakery, is doing what he can to improve the world of postcards. He kicked off an artistic postcard series at his establishment last week with the work of Ventura photographer Kirk Rowan.

“I’ve noticed a whole generation of crappy postcards around town,” he said. “Just generic postcards made on Muscle Beach.”

The idea for the series came about after a failed attempt by the bakery to do poetry readings. “It turned out the city wanted us to pay a huge fee for a nonprofit event,” Keenen said. “To me, there’s the recession right there. We can’t do something because the fee is prohibitive.”

The postcards, he said, cost much less to produce and can be sold to generate money.

Keenen plans to use the series to showcase local artistic talent and is looking for submissions. He said the postcards can be lithographs, woodcuts, anything that can be reproduced in black and white.

Elmhurst School teacher Betty Whitney took her fifth grade students to the Ventura TowneHouse retirement facility last week to say thank you for a $200 gift the folks gave her class.

The money was presented in recognition of Whitney’s winning the Ventura Chamber of Commerce’s teacher of the month honor for April. Whitney has been teaching at Elmhurst for 16 years and in Ventura for 35 years.

Considering her commitment to teaching, it’s not surprising that Whitney turned the thank-you trip into an educational opportunity.

The class assignment? Interview the senior residents. “(The children) asked what school was like when the residents were children, what they studied, whether they had homework,” Whitney said. “They asked them what happened if they didn’t behave in class. The answers were, ‘What? We always behaved.’ ”

Whitney said both young and old were impressed with the encounter. “The children came up with things like, ‘She’s smart, despite how old she is,’ ” said Whitney. “And the older people said, ‘She’s smart, despite the fact she’s only 10.’ ”

More on the TowneHouse-Elmhurst connection: Beginning in September the retirement facility will donate books to the school’s library. “For every child’s birthday we’ll have a resident be their grandparent and give them a book,” said TownHouse administrator Frank Drabickas.

Drabickas said it’s natural to have TowneHouse residents helping a school. “Many, many of the residents are retired teachers,” he said. “We must have a couple dozen Ph.Ds.”

Why so many teachers? “I guess they live longer,” he said. “The average age here is 84, 85 years old.”

This just in: A press release arrived from Rising Star Communications, a Van Nuys firm involved with “writing, consulting and creative projects.”

The cover letter, promoting the new Fess Parker Winery in Los Olivos, began: “ ‘Family values’ is a hot media topic these days, thanks to vice president Dan Quail (sic).”

Something tells us this thing might not fly.

Head hunting: A few weeks ago we had an item about the San Buenaventura Mission aqueduct and the Poli Street filtration building, which was a part of it. The facility was known as El Caballo (Spanish for “The Horse”) because, it is said, its stone fountain resembled a horse’s head.

But that equine resemblance has been debated. There are those who say it looked like various other farm animals. And unfortunately, El Caballo is no longer in one piece, so the argument is impossible to settle--for now.

When we wrote about it, two big chunks of the fountain were missing. Since then, one of those 200-year-old pieces has been located. It seems that the second piece has been sitting at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art for about a decade, unbeknown to museum occupants.

The horse (or whatever) was dug up in the early 1970s by archeologists led by Robert Brown. Since the relic was water-related, Brown passed it on to Vic Detloff, then head of Ventura’s water department.

Detloff, seeing the historical significance of the head, passed it on to Ventura’s redevelopment agency, which was turning the El Caballo site into Eastwood Park. The agency in turn passed it on to the museum, where it was put in the storage yard.

“For years I was told it was missing and never to be found,” said Richard Senate, historian at the Albinger Museum, where the El Caballo pieces are now being kept.

But what about the missing third piece? Senate said an archeological report said the section went to an Ojai man named Tom Adams. Senate tried unsuccessfully to track him down. “It’s the face (portion)--the nose, the lips, and a round hole where the water came out,” said Senate. “It would answer a lot of mysteries if we found that piece. Is it a pig, a dog, a horse, a cow, a lamb?”