Postcard History

On January 1, 1913, the United States Post Office Department presented Americans with a new service – parcel post. The concept originated in Europe almost twenty-five years before and was wildly successful. Congress agreed to examine the idea in 1912 and passed a law that applied to parcels mailed as fourth-class mail.

Parcel post was equally popular here as it was in Europe and postal customers took full advantage. The public approved of the new service since it was fast, cheap, and uncomplicated, but some took an unfair advantage and mailed everything – even their children. One day in Ohio a coffin was mailed! Almost everything was put in a box and mailed – live seafood, pets, a large wheel of cheese, a fish that a boy caught and mailed to his grandfather, a coconut, a crate of oranges, one little girl mailed a “baby tooth” to her grandmother, and there was the company in Missouri that mailed bricks to construction sites. There is a bank in Utah that was built with bricks that were mailed.

Today all those things and more are considered unmailable due to additions, amendments, and legislative changes in postal regulations. One of those pesky postal regulations applied to the kinds of postcards that could be mailed in America. On the long list of forbidden postcards are round ones or any of an irregular shape or size.

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Today’s Postcard History Lesson is presented in cooperation with York Antique Postcards and Collectibles in Williamsburg, Virginia – John A. Lawson III, proprietor.

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The organizational meeting of the Arkansas State Fair Association (the members were mostly local businessmen) met in early 1906 at Hot Springs. The first fair was held that spring. For the first fifteen years the fair was held in Hot Springs, most often in the fall with harvest themes. The card above is an advertisement for the 1909 event.

This early Arkansas State Fair “apple” shaped advertising postcard was mailed one month before the fair opened. Mrs. Ethel Cunningham was the 27-year-old wife of Doctor Ben Lee Cunningham who practiced medicine in Dardanelle, Arkansas.

Today if you wanted to mail this postcard it would have to be in an envelope.

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Have you heard of Clara Bow, the It Girl? Clara was the original American “It” girl.

The term was coined by Elinor Glyn, the British novelist who wrote the 1907 scandalous romance novel Three Weeks. The book received scurrilous reviews in Britain and throughout Europe, but Americans loved it.

Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who became a Hollywood star in the 1920s. She is considered one of the most influential female actresses of the silent film era. Her roles as a flapper and seductress in silent and talking films influenced American women’s fashion and their societal roles well into the 1930s. Women across the country admired her short auburn hair and pencil thin eyebrows and copied the style without shame or remorse.

In 1927 Paramount Studios produced a film with the title It, starring Miss Bow. From the film, Americans adopted the phrase to describe any attractive young woman who was both sexy and appealing.

Then, not unlike today, Hollywood sorts were engaged in many different business endeavors. In the summer of 1937, The Cinnabar Restaurant on the ground floor of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel closed on short notice. Within a few weeks Cinnabar became the It Café, owned by Clara Bow and her husband Rex Bell.

The IT business venture was short lived, but it got people with “deep pockets,” in the door. One account mentions long lines waiting for hours for a late-night dinner.

These round postcards had the exact same image as the beermats used in the Café Bar.

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The “handing someone a lemon” craze hit America in the 1910s.

Many Americans today have no understanding of the phrase for it is no longer in common use and has no socielly acceptable context. Nevertheless, a lemon is a metaphor that refers to something that is undesirable or faulty.

The phrase “handing someone a lemon” could signify the sale or gift of a product that is defective or subpar, particularly in the context of automobiles. This idiomatic expression has its roots here and it became particularly popular in relation to the automobile industry. The post-World War II boom in car manufacturing led to consumers using the word to complain about receiving defective cars and a long list of other products. Issues with defective products resulted in the passage of “Lemon Laws” in the 1970s and ‘80s, that were meant to protect consumers. These laws provided remedies for buyers and at the same time became part of our American culture.

Today this lemon postcard would surely jam the high-speed postal sorting machines.

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It is a little-known fact, but luggage tags were patented by a clever employee, John Michael Lyon, of a now defunct Canadian passenger service that did regular weekly runs between Moncton, New Brunswick and Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. The tags were patented on June 5, 1882, for use by train travelers.

Traditionally, luggage tags have been used by bus, train, and airline carriers to route checked luggage to its final destination. The concept of luggage identification became necessary as early as the 1890s, when tourists began using suitcases that frequently looked the same as the ones that belonged to someone else. Luggage tags curtailed the endless civil claims over lost or misdirected checked bags.

Savvy travelers liked having the ability to identify their belongings from “far across” baggage carousels in busy airports. The unusual postcard luggage tag helped travelers do just that. After your suitcase was retrieved, you could mail the postcard luggage tag home to announced your safe arrival.

The “Petrified Log in Arizona” postcard is a die-cut creation of the Buck Lee Company in Holbrook Arizona. It was one of several postcard luggage tags that achieved instant popularity.

These oddly shaped postcards and many more are on exhibit at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, 2 Massachusetts Ave., N.E., Washington, DC 20002.