Postcard History

The dictionary defines the word “orphan” as a child deprived by death of one or both parents. I was not an orphan, but my college roommate was and it made our friendship difficult because she would frequently turn “solemn” or “moody” every time I talked about a childhood memory.

We haven’t kept in touch over the years, but when I became interested in postcards one category I decided to collect was people who were orphans. At present I have 103 cards that show the face of an orphan or an image related to an individual who was one.

Last weekend, it was bitter cold in Massachusetts, but my husband and both boys had raging cases of “cabin-fever,” so we decided to ride over to Cambridge where there is an antique shop in which we like to wander-around. Among the dealers who display their wares is a postcard seller who has new cards quite often. He is my main reason for visiting. My boys like the dealer with old baseball bats, balls, gloves and cards; my husband is a map connoisseur, especially old gas station maps.

I found five cards that day for my “Orphans” album.

Did you know that Babe Ruth was an orphan?

Well strictly speaking, he wasn’t but many people believe he was – even avid baseball fans. In 1902 he was sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys (a Baltimore reformatory and orphanage) because he was an unruly child and his father had run out of ideas on how to discipline him. The school listed him as “incorrigible,” but kept him on the enrollment lists for the next 12 years.

This card is a William Mullins drawing showcasing the rivalry Ruth had with the Detroit superstar Hank Greenberg.

Other orphans whose names you may recognize are: Marilyn Monroe, Leo Tolstoy, John Lennon, Edgar Allan Poe, Nelson Mandela, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

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Ingrid Bergman was an orphan from age 14.

Bergman was raised as an only child because her two older siblings had died in infancy. When she was two and a half years old, her mother died. What may have been the motive on which she built a career was how she learned to create imaginary friends as a child.

Her father, Justus Bergman wanted his daughter to become an opera star and had her take voice lessons. She attended a prestigious girls’ school in Stockholm, where it was reported that she was neither a good student nor popular.

Justus was a photographer. Ingrid once said, “I was perhaps the most photographed child in Scandinavia.” In 1929, when Bergman was 14, her father died of stomach cancer. Losing her parents at such a young age was a trauma that Bergman later described as “living with an ache.”

Young Ingrid was no stranger to death. After her father died, she went to live with her paternal aunt, Ellen, who died of heart disease six months later. Then she lived with her paternal uncle Otto and his wife Hulda. She also spent long stretches visiting her maternal aunt, Elsa Adler, whom she eventually called Mutti (Mom). Elsa also died before Ingrid was an adult.

According to family lore, Ingrid told everyone, “I have wanted to be an actress almost as long as I can remember.” And she prepared to be one by dressing in her deceased mother’s clothes, and staging plays in her father’s empty studio.

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Julia Roberts was 4 when her mother filed for divorce in 1971 and left the family; her father died of cancer when she was 10. She left her Smyrna, Georgia, high school after graduating for New York.

Julia’s first step in career management came when she chose to work at the Click Modeling Agency in 1987, and at the same time she enrolled in acting classes. 

Her first film roles came in 1988 when she appeared in Mystic Pizza, and in 1989 in Steel Magnolias; both have become American classics. Then came Pretty Woman in 1990, a movie that practically defined her. Her current “filmography” consists of 55 titles.

Julia Roberts’s unfading beauty and enchanting smile has placed her very near the top of the world’s most recognizable people list.

Aside from Ingrid Bergman and Julia Robert’s there are dozens of Hollywood personalities who were orphans; some are Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Bronson, James Dean, Jane and Peter Fonda, Clark Gable, Anthony Quinn, Jane Russell, Barbara Streisand, and Lana Turner. Three orphaned TV entertainers were Lee Majors, Carol Burnett, Art Linkletter, and many others. In Britain Sir Lawrence Olivier was an orphan and so was Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock.

Three Presidents of the United States were orphans: James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Herbert Hoover.

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Al Jolson was an orphan. He was born as Asa Yoelson into a Jewish family in Lithuania. He didn’t know his birthday (Jewish families at that time did not record birth dates); he thought he was born in 1885. It wasn’t until around 1900 that his birth was discovered to be May 26, 1886.

In 1891, his father, a rabbi and cantor moved to New York City to secure a better future for his family. He found work in a local synagogue and by 1894 had earned enough to bring his family to America.

Jolson’s mother, Naomi, died at 37 in early 1895, after which young Asa spent the next year in the same orphanage in Baltimore where Babe Ruth was enrolled. In the spring of 1902, Jolson accepted a long series of jobs in a variety of vaudeville-style entertainment centers: first, a circus, then burlesque shows, and minstrel shows. He made his Broadway debut in 1911 and remained a stage performer for the next decade.

Most of Jolson fame came because he starred in the first partial “talkie” movie, The Jazz Singer, and the first all “talking” movie The Singing Fool.

Jolson’s co-star in The Singing Fool (1928) was a three-year-old child star named David Lea. Hollywood turned David into Davey Lee and he played the part of “Sonny Boy” to great acclaim. My new postcard is a scene from the movie.

The song “Sonny Boy” became the first million selling recording, and the film, The Singing Fool was the top grossing motion picture until Gone With the Wind.

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Orphaned artists include Salvador Dali, Edward Munch, and Mary Cassatt, Composers and musicians who were orphans include J. S. Bach, Bela Bartock, Ludwig van Beethoven, Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles.

At the south end of Times Square (at 42nd Street and Broadway) in New York City stands a building erected in 1905 by the New York Times. At the time the newspaper’s new address was 1 Longacre Square, but it soon became 1 Times Square and the center of “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” It was the founder’s way of saying that the Times would report the news impartially. One way to report the news was the electronic bulletin board that was installed over the north-side entrance door.

From early in the morning of December 9, 1980, and for an entire week afterward the sign reported the death (murder) of John Winston Lennon, an orphan kid from Liverpool, England.

I’m sure you’ve heard of him!