Vintage Postcards

A friend of mine from our Woodbury Friends Meeting has collected family holiday postcards from the early 20th Century and they are beautiful! Fortunately for me, she had some copied and made into gifts last Christmas. I sent one of my favorites to my daughter in New York this year; it is a small imagine af a girl skiing in the center of an embossed square, very delicate and elegant. I often send her postcards as wwell as pop up cards, a little tradition of ours.

I have written before about my Great-Uncle Yock, my father's uncle, who worked in the post office in Ocean City, New Jersey back in the 1950's and whenever postcards came through with postage but no address (a fairly common occurrence) he put our address in Philadelphia. We frequently had postcards from compete strangers having a good time at the seashore. It was funny.

That gave me a lifelong interest in postcards as well as in stamps and the US Mail in general. As a teacher, one of the art lessons I taught was designing a postage stamp during Black History Month and Women's History Month. As an enrichment mentor, I often took my students to the post office and helped them start stamp collections. I have given away my own stamp collections twice.

Back in the early 2000's I gave my most interesting postcards to my daughter to use to send thank you notes to donors to a couple of early film projects she was working on, the 78 Project, and later Love All Alices. I had stopped collecting postcards with about 2 shoebox size containers and begun using them and getting them back to their intended purpose.

My house had begun to feel like one of those little corners in a creek or river where the flotsum and jetsum deposits tree trunks and beach chairs and coolers and other items detached from their original purpose.

That feeling is also why I have been donating hundreds of books to the Free Books Project - to get these items out of my cove and back to their original purpose.

This past Sunday, my friend with the vintage family postcards brought them to share during our discussion hour from 10:00 to 11;00 before silent worship and again I was interested in postcards and I discoverd there is a postcard club not far from here.

Postcards: Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club (WC4) www.facebook.com › Pages › Businesses › Nonprofit organization Rating 5.0 (2) THE NEXT MEETING of the Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club will be held on Monday, November 10, 2025, at the Union Fire Company, 1396 River Rd. (NJ29), ... Local Postcard Clubs - Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club www.wc4postcards.org › localpostcardclubs Meeting day: Second Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. For additional information: Joan Kay - 718-375-7353

I don't collect anymore or even really have anything left worth showing or sharing, but I may drop in one day to visit. Also, I am painting postcard sized paintings and I have discovered on the internet that there are artists doing that as well.

By the way, a side note is that the original printed postcards began in the late 1800's around 1880 or so and in Germany. Before that, of course, travelers with art skills made painted scenes to send home and I saw a splendid show of these tiny masterpieces once in New York, many years ago. I suppose the days of all paper mail for private consumption are on the wane and maybe almost gone. This year I dropped from my origina 100 cards per year down to 15 Last year it was 75 and the year before, 50. People don't send cards anymore and they can be disappointed if they receive one because it means they have to go and get cards and stamps and make a return mailing. Perhaps it is wasteful but it is also a little beauty and adventure, this piece of paper traveling from one house, state, or even country, to another to bring a greeting. But now, here we are doing that electronically, can't collect these though, can we, and where's the history?

The American Museum in Deptford, a little local museum on Andaloro Way which used to be Andaloro Farm, has a collection of postcards as well as trains, fishing reels, fosils, and a myriad of other objects to amuse and delight and make you think about history in all its material forms.

Merry Christmas my Friends!

wrightj45@yahoo.com