At a time in American history when telephones were scarce, a hundred years before e-mails and text messaging, the nation depended on postcards, and people sent them to friends and relatives on a daily basis. Today, huge collections of postcards remain – featuring places in Virginia, for example, that may no longer exist. Sandy Hausman has that story:
A massive show of cards is coming to the Roanoke area in mid-April.
Show sponsor Mike Uzel is president of the Old Dominion Postcard Club. He says visitors will find hundreds of boxes filled with cards filed by categories like holidays, humor, dogs, cats, cars, small towns and cities. His collection of about 5,000 cards, for example, includes some 600 of Petersburg.
“Petersburg was a big tobacco center and kind of the crossroads of several major railroad lines. Plus any town of any size back in the early 1900’s took pictures of just about any building," Uzel says, "and sometimes those pictures are the only ones left of certain buildings, because nobody else bothered to take a picture.”
There are postcards featuring prisons, and nursing homes, gas stations – even bathrooms! “Sure enough there were advertisements for tubs and showing bathrooms in hotels,” according to Uzel.
Uzel loves the art on some -- and the history of others. “Postcards in the United States didn’t start until around 1893 – the Colombian Exposition. In Europe they were a little earlier than us, and in the early 1900’s there was really a postcard craze. They had clubs all around the country.”
Many cards sell for a quarter or less, and dealer David Brimer loves to see how cheaply customers can experience joy. “We have people at every show that find a card that they’ve looked for for years, or they didn’t even know existed, and they’re so excited, and if you can get someone excited over a dollar piece of paper, that’s sort of nice.”
On the pricier side are cards that cost hundreds of dollars – among them one sent by a Richmond travel agency promoting the newest luxury cruise. “It’s a Titanic card, and it was sent before the Titanic sailed. On the back it’s pre-printed: Thank you for your past patronage," organizer Mike Uzel explains. "He sent them to his clients who used his services before, and he hopes that they’ll continue to use his services for safe travel the world over. This was mailed in December of 1911. Four months later the Titanic hits an iceberg and is sitting on the bottom of the ocean.”
Natural disasters were also considered good postcard material. “They would print them soon after the flood or whatever natural disaster, and whoever mailed the cards could send them to friends to let them see what had happened,” says Uzel.
And cards were widely used to advertise businesses. Dealer Carol Kamin made that discovery after she and her husband bought a friend’s collection. They were driving to a sale near her home in suburban Chicago when she got the shock of a lifetime. “My husband drives and I price postcards, and I’m pricing postcards and all of a sudden he goes, ‘Are you okay?’ I said, ‘No. I’m not.’ He asked me if he needed to pull over. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well you’ve been staring at that card for five minutes,’ and I said, ‘Dean, I think these are my great grandparents.’”
Her kin had owned a general store in rural Wisconsin and used postcards to advertise. “I knew at the point I was meant to sell postcards, and I was meant to sell his postcards in particular," Kamin remembers. "It was a sign from God as far as I’m concerned.”
Others who were lured to collect cards will be in Salem at the Baymont Inn Friday and Saturday, April 12th and 13th at 10 a.m. to buy, sell and swap postcards.
