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POSTCARD RELATED ARTICLES LARGER THAN LIFE AN ONLINE BUSINESS LETS YOU TURN THOSE BELOVED VINTAGE TEXAS POSTCARDS INTO FRAMED BEAUTIES Barbara Rodriquez Reprinted from The Dallas Morning News, March 3, 2005 I had a postcard collection once. It was taped to the back side of the door to a bathroom so small it took some maneuvering to get in. As captivating as the collection was, it wasn’t a viewing situation you could share. And that’s been the perennial rub with postcard art. As Liz Coursen says, “You can own the greatest postcard collection in the world, but you can’t display it. People come over to your house and what are you going to do, shove a photograph album at them?” A die-hard collector, Ms. Coursen’s answer to the problem allows anyone with Internet access to not only view tens of thousands of images published since the early 1900s, but also own art-quality reproductions. Ms. Coursen collects the postcards, pays the price of ownership (from a few bucks to thousands of dollars per card) and, thanks to sophisticated print-on-demand technology, you can buy art-sized, crisp postcard images of almost anything you can imagine – and all things Texan abound. And, while finding sought-after additions for her collection can take Ms. Coursen years, you can choose an image and have it printed and shipped on the same day. The whole thing started because Ms. Coursen (who lives in Sarasota, Fla.) wanted to share with her best friend in Boston a vintage postcard she’d found. The only way she could share the card with her friend was to send it to her. The friend loved the card, and, of course, Ms. Coursen never saw it again. There had to be a better way of “sharing,” she decided. And, too, she was motivated by husband (and co-owner) Phil Neigh’s wish that she find a way to underwrite her increasingly costly hobby. It’s a hobby no more. Currently there are tens of thousands of images reflecting her diverse interests and discriminating eye. Not surprisingly, a great deal of the collection is devoted to our great state, from the ridiculous to the architectural, historical and fanciful. But Ms. Coursen didn’t know the true intensity of Texans’ affinity for their state until her art reproductions were featured in Texas Edition, Southern Living two years ago. “We had a huge response,” she says. And her response to the Texans’ interest? “Holy cow!” Since then, she’s made it a mission to get more Texas-related materials onto the site. To explain the broad number of Lone Star postcards out there, she says: “You all seem to revel in the size and grandeur of Texas, and the postcard publishers of the ‘40s and ‘50s recognized that. And Texas is unlike any other state in terms of bragging rights.” And, she says, not only do Texans have an appetite for her Texas images, they typically buy larger sizes. And while bigger-than-Dallas local subjects move briskly, Fort Worth material is sought even more avidly. Collectors drive the prices higher than her budget, she says. “They will get nuts to have a deep collection of Fort Worth material, and it’s difficult to get around them.” Not that you’re limited to images from the rival cities. “There’s a wealth of material that reflects that interest and pride in the state,” she says. Hand-tinted bird’s-eye views of football stadiums, including the University of Texas at Austin and the Cotton Bowl, are good sellers. Time-capsule sepia-toned views of Main Streets and courthouses are perennial favorites. And as the site features cards from 80 Texas cities, you can probably find the monument, city street, annual event, rodeo queen or natural wonder you’ve been dreaming about hanging on your wall. Two glittering, hand-tinted views of Dallas’ “Theater Row” from the ‘40s have appeal, but the hands-down favorites of designing women with daughters’ rooms to decorate are the iconographic “Texas Belles.” The appeal, Ms. Coursen says, is that these toothy, fringed and robust women are “strong, independent and yet very feminine.” Not unlike the Kilgore Rangerettes, images of whom surprisingly aren’t offered – but several images of oil rigs in downtown Kilgore are available. One caveat: Buy once and you will probably buy again. Texas decorators, Ms. Coursen says, have been known to make multiple buys. And there’s a good chance you could get hooked by a series. For Ms. Coursen, it is the “Roosevelt” series she describes as “fabulous cards with pithy sayings by Teddy Roosevelt, art nouveau embellishments and an African animal.” Series can be the collector’s money pit. When she started collecting the Roosevelts, she thought it was a series of six cards. When she came upon a seventh, she knew it was a series of 12. “Which means,” she says, laughing, “I am going to go to my grave looking for all 12.” Barbara Rodriguez is a Fort Worth freelance writer. RESOURCES: 941-954-3124 Liz Coursen: www.AmericanPostcardArt.com. The company offers up to 15 standard sizes, three canvases and papers, beginning at $50. Think you might like to start your own postcard collection? The best material comes from postcard shows. Spending time at a show is the best way to educate your eye, Liz Coursen says, but it’s also maniacal good fun. “Typically, a show will have between 20 and 200 dealers with table after table of nothing but boxes of postcards. It boggles the mind. And everyone is insanely enthusiastic.” (Check out the show this weekend at Lockheed Recreation Center, 3400 Bryant Irvin Road, Fort Worth, or 281-565-0771 for info.) If your interest catches fire, expect to follow these benchmarks along your path from amateur to enthusiast: www.ftworthshow.com related to your hometown. You buy cards that are related to a special interest or hobby; You branch into an affinity for certain artists and publishers; You discover you’re buying $2 postcards to buying $20-$30 cards; you’re doomed. Ms. Coursen says, “you can’t go back.” You begin buying top-of-the-line collectibles produced in limited numbers that can cost thousands of dollars. Once you’ve refined your tastes, join the Dallas Metroplex Postcard Club. ___________________________________________________________________ 'WHY DON'T YOU WRITE? SOUVENIRS FROM A CENTURY OF TRAVLE BECOME POSTAL TREASURERS Bryan Woolley Reprinted from The Dallas Morning News, November 6, 2004 They’re little windows into times gone, glimpses of a world we can’t know. They’re whispers of voices long dead, words of love, concern, joy, of news about ordinary lives. Throughout the 20th century, few Americans journeyed beyond the borders of their towns and villages without mailing picture postcards to family and friends back home. “Dropping a line” is what we called it. “Drop me a line when you get there,” we would say, and the departing loved one would promise to do that. What the homebodies wanted were long, newsy letters. But once out of sight, the travelers lived in a different world, riding trains, visiting new places, seeing strange sights, having thrilling adventures. They had neither inclination nor time to sit at a hotel writing table with leaky pen and blotter and scribble pages. In the lobby or the train depot they would write a postcard. And that was OK. A century ago, a paper image of a strange place was a novel and fascinating thing to receive in the mail. Postcards were mementos of the people who sent them. They were saved to show to family and neighbors. The travelers would buy copies for themselves, too, as souvenirs of the places they had been. The popularity of postcards began on May 19, 1898, when the government halved the postage on privately printed cards - cards not printed and sold by the post office - to 1 cent. The law also required that the whole back of the card be reserved for the address, stamp and postmark. Any message had to be scrawled on the other side, in the margin of the picture or over the picture itself. In July 1907, the government approved the modern divided-back cards that people still send from Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Both message and address are written on one side, allowing the picture on the other side to remain unspoiled. This small innovation turned the postcard fad into a craze. In the year following the introduction of the divided-back card, America’s 88 million citizens mailed 678 million cards. Throughout the century, additional millions of cards were sent every year, and hundreds of thousands of them got tucked away into albums, trunks and boxes. Now they’re collectors’ items, for sale in antique shops, at flea markets, on eBay. They cost a couple of bucks or $100 or more, depending on their age, rarity and condition, and the degree of lust for them in a buyer’s heart. Some are 3 1/2 by 5 1/2 inch works of art -
lithographs, watercolors, photographs printed by master craftsmen in England,
Germany and Switzerland - that gave thousands of Americans their first
glimpses of exotic city streets and bucolic landscapes where they would never
get to go. Purists prefer pristine cards that were never written upon, stamped, mailed nor postmarked. But as a collector, I love those with ancient 1-cent stamps portraying Franklin or Washington, postmarks showing the places and days and sometimes even the hours at which the post office received them, and messages written by people like me, but a century ago, at tiny moments that I now can ponder. On April 7, 1907, Lena M. sent a postcard from Pecos, Texas, to Miss Lovenia Hecoit (or something like that; Lena’s handwriting was terrible) in Dickens, Texas. The front portrays a crew of cowboys and several long-skirted women - obviously visitors - eating a meal at the chuck wagon. The caption under the picture reads, “Chuck Time at the Round-Up. Davis Mountains.” Across the top of the picture, Lena wrote: “I am on here find me.” On the back she delivered a pre-emptive strike against Lovenia: “Hello kid I think it is time you was writing I did not have time to write you a letter.” Lena M. knew Lovenia was going to write to her and ask: “Why don’t you write?” So she beat her friend to the draw. “Why don’t you write?” was surely the century’s most frequently written postcard sentence. On Oct. 14 sometime in the early 1900s - this postmark names no year, but it’s before the divided-back innovation - Mr. Jon. T. Godsey of Cumberland, Va., was sent a postcard portraying “Main St., Dallas, Tex.,” with horses and buggies, a busy businessman crossing the street, and a trolley down the block. At the bottom is scrawled: “Please answer me as I’m your name sake. John T. Godsey. Oak Cliff. Care of Mr. G. T. Godsey, Oak Cliff, Texas, Dallas, Texas.” Was John T. Godsey a child, writing to his uncle or grandfather? Or was he an adult, a derelict nephew, perhaps, thinking of Jon. T.’s last will and testament? On Oct. 11, 1906, a woman named Gusta wrote to Mrs. A. K. Burland of Erie, Pa.: “Dear Etta: Dallas is quite a bustling city for its size 80,000 inhabitants. We expect to be here until a week from Saturday and then go back to St. Louis, and it may be August will then go back to Washington. If so I will go to Boston from St. Louis and will stop off at Erie on my way to Boston. Love to all.” This itinerary is in cramped script around three sides of the little lithograph of Main Street. Etta may have dizzied, trying to read and understand Gusta’s plans. Like all serious collectors, I don’t accumulate willy-nilly. I specialize in four towns for which I hold emotional fondness: Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso and Fort Davis, my hometown. Some of the more intriguing messages in my collection were written in San Antonio and El Paso during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the days of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. On Aug. 27, 1913, someone who signed himself simply “Hey” wrote to his “Dear Folks” in Wichita, Kan.: “Well I just got back from Juárez. Thought we would have some trouble before we got out of town.” What were the folks in Kansas supposed to think of that, written from a border city of mystery and danger? What had Hey been up to? On Oct. 17, 1914, this mysterious message was written in pale pencil on the back of a picture of the Alamo and mailed to Galveston: “Hello Rice. San Antonio is some town but not for me. Am still going. Will write you what my address is when I get to the border. Be good.” The clerk stamped the postmark directly on
top of the writer’s name, rendering it illegible. Who scrawled this dark
message? Why was he going with such urgency to the border? Was he on the lam?
Was he about to join the revolution? Maybe a woman wrote it, rejecting Rice
and heading south? It isn’t signed. But it told Mrs. Trammell all she needed to know. It’s succinct, serene and perfect. ___________________________________________________________________ GLIMPSES OF BYGONE DAYS Larry Swindell Reprinted from The Star-Telegram, October 24, 2004 FICTION (Book Review) Take a trip - 15 small but profound journeys - with Robert Olen Butler. Remember to pack your brain and your sense of humor. Robert Olen Butler remains, unfortunately, a precious literary secret. Over the past two decades he has crafted 10 exquisite novels and two story collections; yet even with a Pulitzer in this portfolio, Butler at best is a cult figure, beckoning those who read for mental stimulation, for character and action, for assured surprise. Butler hasn’t written the same book twice, yet now he surpasses himself with a wholly original conception. He’s a passionate collector of picture postcards from the era of heir heady American vogue - the first two decades of the 20th century. Exercising both mind and talent, he has devised full-bodied narratives from brief postcard messages contained in his personal archives. Together, the components of Had a Good Time vividly summon a naive American ethos that eroded during two World Wars and now has vanished forever. The book contains 15 vignettes in which each first-person narrator reveals a unique voice in detailing an experience or defining an attitude. The reading of any one story triggers excited anticipation of the next. Had a Good Time is a legacy of supreme imagination, surely inimitable. One example is a message on a card postmarked Portland, Ore., in 1909: “Dear Pauline: Arrived in Portland yesterday morning and it was such a relieve because we had an upper berth and I didn’t sleep a wink. Well I got married to Milk Can and we are on our honey moon. Mr. Watt is here and he looks stunning. Katie” In “I Got Married to Milk Can,” Butler spins a magical tale of an ingenue newly wed to a “dairy baron,” who is seeking a replacement for his deceased mother. Katie’s subsequent encounter in Portland with Mr. Watt of the amoral avant-garde anchors a funny story that the reader also recognizes as tragic, although Katie never will. Then there’s the message on a card postmarked in Sunnyvale, Calif. in 1911: “Dear Mathilda, Just a line to let you know I am still alive. I am not going on that hayride. The young man that wants me to go with his sister in law. But she has a cork leg. I am awful tired that is the main reason. Regards to all, Milton.” But awkward Milton does go on that hayride with Minnie, who has smarts as well as a cork leg. “The Iron-workers’ Hayride” is hilarity that showcases Butler’s preferred approach to comedy - not cracking jokes, but presenting human foibles endearingly. These stories date from 1906 through World War I, when “Mother in the Trenches” details a woman’s capricious but desperate journey to France to be with her son at the front. The card’s blurred photo depicts a helmeted woman in a sandbag-backed trench. This is a profoundly affecting story, but no more so than “Twins,” which is set on Ellis Island. Twins Bridget and Caitlin learn that one of them is diseased and cannot be admitted to the United States. This tale is bittersweet, but resolved affirmatively. “Uncle Andrew” portrays a proud old black man who remembers his time in slavery. “Up by Heart” depicts a dim would-be evangelist who has memorized the Bible but hasn’t grasped its message. “The One in white” takes us to a Mexico in revolution; the postcard photo shows a U.S. journalist (the narrator) passing a dead body on the sidewalk. Butler is a writer of marvelous imagination. Momentum gathers, story upon story. Read them in sequence. You’ll know you had a good time. Larry Swindell of Morago, Calif., is the former books editor of the Star-Telegram. ___________________________________________________________________ MAIL CULL COLLECTORS CELEBRATE THE LONG AND COLORFUL LEGACY OF THE POSTCARD Connie Dufner Reprinted from The Dallas Morning News, March 23, 1996 They are America’s original Post-It notes, snapshots of news and culture, windows into lives then and now. Found everywhere today from airports to gift shops, postcards have a distinguished and colorful history of more than 100 years. Dealers, collectors and historians say the postcard collecting craze hit its peak in the early 1900s. But to the 60 or so members of the Dallas Metroplex Postcard Club who converged at the 12th annual postcard fair at Olla Podrida last weekend, the penchant for postcards is as alive as ever. “At one time, there was a box of postcards in every living room in the United states,” says Jack Thornhill of Garland, postcard dealer and founder of the postcard club. Then, as now, every yellowing card under a glass-top coffee table, every album in a musty attic has a tell to tell about the people who sent them and those who saved them. EARLY USES HISTORY IN A WORD HOW TO GET STARTED WHAT TO COLLECT? SOURCES: The Encyclopedia of Antique Postcards, Picture Postcards in the United States 1893-1918. ___________________________________________________________________ TEXAS POSTCARD COLLECTORS THRILL TO PICTURES WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS Gene Fowler Reprinted from Texas Highways, February 1995 The next time you venture down the highway to far-flung corners of the land and scrawl a light-hearted “Wish you were here” to the folks back home on a postcard of the Big Bend, the Big Thicket, or Big Tex, imagine the card’s impact in, say, the year 2094. Quite possible, a 21st-Century postcard collector will acquire the small, brightly colored work of art as a treasure from the past. The collector might view the card as rich with meaning, a once-common document encoded with the daily hieroglyphs of 20th-Century culture. Perhaps he or she will regard the lifeways of the 1990s with the same sense of romance with which we view the 1890s. The golden age of postcards, historians say, began about 1906 and ended around 1915. The hobby of collecting the rigid paper images, however, has spread like wildfire in recent years. Across Texas, groups like the Borderlands Postcard Club of El Paso and Houston Area Postcard Club gather and preserve postcard arcana, and they sponsor shows that draw hundred, from connoisseurs to the merely curious. Postcard dealers like James McMillin of Fort Worth, proprietor of Mac’s Used Cards, have amassed inventories that might even include a card featuring your grandparents’ kitchen sink. A diverse network of collectors hunts for a crazy-quilt array of special postcard categories. Many collect scenes of their hometowns, or views of railroad depots, banks, courthouses, and hotels. Others get a bit more esoteric. As one collector says, “You name it – somebody collects it.” Hazel Leler, a charter member of the first
postcard club formed in Houston, collects cards featuring witches, Halloween
(possibly the world’s largest collection), and people on stilts. Austin
collector Kathy Fesler, who sought postcards of dachshunds dressed in duds.
Jim Dickens of El Paso collects cards of Prohibition-era saloons in Ciudad
Juarez, as well as cards of people going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, a
big rubber ball, or just about anything else. Teddy Roosevelt postcards top the list in the collection of Bob Fesler, president of the Capital of Texas Postcard Club. Allen Wisby of Pasadena collects postcards of tugboats and scenes along the Gulf of Mexico’s intra-coastal waterways. A retired tugboat engineer and captain, Allen figures he’s landed about 3,000 tugboat cards. Austin antique dealer Susan Toomey Frost lassoes postcards of cowgirls. As one of her recent finds, she displays a rare postcard of black cowgirls. When asked how many cowgirl cards she’s rounded up, Susan replies, “Not enough.” Mary Sarber, main library administrator of the El Paso Public Library and president of the Borderlands Postcard Club, caught the postcard bug when she helmed the library’s Southwest Collection. She gathered many of the library’s “real-photo” postcards of the Mexican Revolution and Pancho Villa’s campaigns, as well as colorful views of El Paso and other spots in that neck of the cactus garden. “Some of the earliest Texas postcards were
scenes of El Paso,” says Mary. “They were produced at least as early as
1905.” Currently, Mary focuses her personal postcard interest on real-photo
cards of American women circa 1905 to 1920. Hispanic women of El Paso and
South Texas make up an interesting subset of the collection, and she hopes to
compile the collective imagery into book form. “Many of these images were
taken by amateur photographers,” says Mary, “and the photos the women chose
to put on postcards and mail to friends and family reveal a lot about the
texture of their lives.” Glenn’s customers look for all kinds of images, be it cards of ostriches, Texas’ mineral water health resorts, or “Texas brags.” A number of his clients collect real-photo cards of oil boomtown like Ranger, Desdemona, Burkburnett, and Borger. Glenn’s own favorites include the Texas “pansy and butterfly” cards, which have photos or drawings of town sites superimposed on the flower’s petals or the butterfly’s wings. “They’re from around 1912, and they’re fairly rare,” says Glenn. “I’ve got about 15 to 20 of them from towns like Taylor, Victoria, and Lockhart.” Gloria Jackson of Dennison just might have a few butterflies among the quarter of a million postcards she has collected over the past 50 years. Gloria sells and swaps through her postcard-collecting pen-pal club and her bimonthly newsletter, Gloria’s Corner. For those who like to buy in volume, she offers shoeboxes of assorted postcards for $20. Gloria says that enjoyment of postcards is “my way of traveling, a way of seeing and learning about the past.” Tugboat-card collector Allen Wisby says
that part of the fun is that you can find postcards “where you least expect
them.” Allen recommends antique malls and flea markets, but says the best
place to find cards is at the club’s shows. Like the El Paso Public Library’s Southwest Collection, archival repositories across the state recognize the historical importance of picture postcards and the need to preserve them. Don Kelly of Port Arthur donated his 1,000-card collection of “The Golden Triangle” counties of Orange, Jefferson, and Hardin to the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center in Liberty. Photographic copies of these and other historic postcard images are available at most such institutions. Collectors in Amarillo, Corpus Christi, and Houston have even published books that chronicle local history as revealed in postcards. Ray Franks and Jay Ketelle published Amarillo Texas: A Picture Postcard History for the town’s centennial in 1987. With cards that ran the gamut from Boot Hill to Cadillac Ranch, the authors thought they had the city posted. “But after the book came out,” says Ray, “people brought us so many cards from shoeboxes and family albums that we published Volume II. It includes cards of the 1949 tornado and the world’s biggest penny postcard, presented by Amarillo postal employees to Eleanor Roosevelt when she attended the city’s first Mother-in-Law Day Parade in 1938.” How big was it? Twelve feet long and more that seven feet high! Even celebrities surrender to the spell of old picture postcards. A friend sent Amarillo native Tula Ellice Finklea, better known as movie star Cyd Charisse, a copy of Volume II of the town’s history-via-postcards, which contains a card of her dancing with Fred Astaire in the 1953 film The Band Wagon. The Actress wrote back that she and her mother had stayed up all night with the book, turning its pages, fascinated by rekindled memories of the Texas town they know and loved so long ago. “That’s the great thing about postcards,” says dealer Glenn Butler. “They bring back memories and make people happy.” It’s easy to get carried away with postcards. A recent editorial in Gloria’s Corner joked about “postcard fever.” “support groups,” and “treatment programs.” A collector since 1938, James McMillin of Mac’s Used Cards in Fort Worth has dealt with the gentle compulsion all his live. “There was a time,” says James, “when I felt I had to possess every postcard ever printed of the Alamo and the other Spanish missions, and at least one view of every county seat in the state, and then one view from every city in the whole country.” James sold off most of his inventory of 225,000 cards five years ago after an illness, and his stock now is “down to about 30,000.” Still, he’s on the road at the drop of a hat to talk and show postcards in Arkansas or Austin–or most anywhere. “Not long ago,” says James, “I sat outside the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco with a fella for five hours while he looked through five boxes of cards.” Like most collectors and dealers, a lot of attraction for James is simply the folks he meets along the postcard trail. “postcard people are good people,” mused a browser at a recent Dallas show. “They may get a little crazy sometimes, but after all, we’re talkin’ about postcards. Austin freelance writer GENE FOWLER collected postcards of Del Rio, Glen Rose, Marlin, Putnam, Mineral Wells, Blossom, Sour Lake, and other Texas towns as illustrations for his books Border Radio and Crazy Water. PAST POSTCARDS In 1893, during the World Colombian Exposition in Chicago, the U.S. government sanctioned the use of penny postcards. Five years later, an act of Congress authorized private mailing cards at the same one-cent. Until 1906, the post office required that one entire side of the card be reserved for the address. Thus, many cards written before that year will have messages written on the image side, often on the images themselves. When the “divided back” postcard became available, American correspondents ushered in the “golden age of the postcard,” which lasted until about 1915. The ear ended when changes brought about by World War I forever altered the “face” of the postcard industry. During the boom, however, printed cards as well as “real-photo” postcards, which were black-and-white cards with either hand-printed photographs or photos printed in limited editions, soared in popularity. Vacation resorts often featured studios where you could have your picture taken and printed on a card to send back home. Real-photo cards continued to be made to a limited degree into the early 1950s. From 1916 to about 1930, U.S. printers produced cards with small white border around the picture. Later, linen cards, which absorbed ink better, attained prominence until the mid- to late- 1940s. At that time, card printers introduced the color chrome process, which still graces most postcards today. Gene Fowler For more information about the club contact us via email: dmpostcardclub@verizon.net. ___________________________________________________________________ |
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