Postcard History

Lucile Palmer was born in Delaware City, Iowa, in April 1892. Her parents, Willis (an insurance agent) and Etta had two older children: Fannie (age 21) and Sigmond (19); Lucile was the baby of the family.

In a respectful way, it can be said, the Palmer family had very shallow roots: Lucile was born in Iowa, raised in Ohio and West Virginia. After her marriage in 1919 to Arthur Entriken, she lived in California at no less than four addresses and in Brazil.

There is no genealogical evidence as to when she first developed her writing skills, but the bulk of her work appeared between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s.

Outside the world of poetry, Palmer’s most famous work appeared shortly after her husband’s death in 1941, it was a novel entitled Cat Eye (a murder mystery romance published in 1949 by Sargent House, Los Angeles, California).

After considerable hours researching Lucile Palmer, I have concluded that she probably thought in rhymes. As I discovered the informational bits and pieces of her life it may be that she was a creative genius.

Lucile was by every measure a talented individual. She was an amateur actress as much as a writer. She wrote songs, speeches, and lyrics for at least three film scores (one of which received an Oscar nomination). She was involved in community projects throughout the war years and often served on veterans’ affairs projects.

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Lucile Palmer’s connection to the world of postcards came in 1939. It was then that Sargent House Publishers of Hollywood took its first steps into postcard publishing with a contrived set they called Palmer Penny Poem Postal. The 32-card set was available through the mail for twenty-five cents.

Each card in the set carried one or more of Palmer’s Penny Poems and many were illustrated.

After the success of the postcard series, Palmer maintained her much earned success by asking Sargent House to publish a series of poetry books that enjoyed nearly international success. The company agreed and so followed two more novels, several chapbooks, and two major anthologies. Sample poems from Heart Throbs From Reno and Purely Personal are above.

In a 1968 anthology entitled, Poetry Is the Reflection, which may have been the last of Palmer’s poetry books, she “dedicated with love” the contents to her husband Trevellick A. McMillan. The book includes twenty-seven poems, ranging from three lines to five stanzas.

The three-line opus is a Haiku to old age, used in a stage play by Louise Du Val.

In the citations that accompany the poetry is a prize list (dated) for each poem. The citations also include her literary medals and prizes from around the world, literally from Paris to the Philippines.

Lucile Palmer died on October 3, 1975, and was buried in California.