Editor’s Staff

Help Us Solve
the Mystery of this Card #3

The December Mystery Card comes to you from a loyal reader in Connecticut with the following message:

I am curating a book of vintage postcards on behalf of the Valley Stream Historical Society, in Nassau County on Long Island, New York. This postcard photo is under consideration for inclusion in the book, but it is mislabeled. It is not Main Street, Valley Stream.

The woman who wrote the card, Edith Runner was not from Valley Stream. When she wrote the card to her mother, she had just arrived as a teacher. I imagine she bought the card at a local drugstore on Rockaway Avenue. The shopkeeper may not have been aware of the error.

Valley Stream didn’t have a Main Street. Rockaway Avenue was our main street. There is a similarity in the street, but it is not Valley Stream. Rockaway Avenue is well documented with many postcards. This street is much wider than the one in Valley Stream. Also, we don’t have the curve at the end.

Please help me find the hometown of this card.  We have a good many non-Valley Stream postcards and I am thinking of creating a short chapter at the end of the book with the “bloopers.”

                                                                                                        Many thanks, Amy

This postcard is part of an estate and is currently on loan to the historical society for use in the book being curated by Amy.

The card is an Eagle Postcard Company product. Eagle worked from a factory at 245 7^th Avenue, New York, New York from 1910 to 1954. The company logo was an eagle as in this icon. It was usually printed on the card’s address side along the bottom edge at almost exactly the size you see here. Postcard History has been unable to verify a publication date, but we assume it is from the mid-1920s through the late-1930s.

Edith’s message to her Mother

As for the sender, Edith Runner was a native of Cohocton, New York, and a 1916 graduate of Haverling High School in Bath. She also attended the Arnot-Ogden Hospital School of Nursing and later served for 21 years on the faculty of Valley Stream High School. From these facts it may be safe to assume that Miss Runner was first employed in Valley Stream around 1929.

A Breyers Ice Cream sign can be seen in the photo, but it will be of little help since Breyers was a Philadelphia company that had sold their products in several mid-Atlantic states since the 1880s. The cars in the picture will be more help in identifying the date, but the question is, “Where was this scene?”

If you can answer this question and solve the mystery, contact Postcard History at the following email: editor@postcardhistory.net