Wish You Were Here!

By Randy Mallory

Long rows of tables line the spacious meeting hall, each covered edge to edge with boxes of precious paper. Thirty-somethings sit beside octogenarians at the tables—like old-fashioned librarians at card-catalog cases—perusing box after box. Frequently, someone pulls a plastic-wrapped piece from a box, holds it up to better light, and checks the other side for a telltale postmark or message.

Dedicated deltiologists—postcard collectors—join the merely curious in Austin at the Capital of Texas Postcard Club’s annual show to search, find, dicker, and plunk down a few dollars for a colorful 3-by-5-inch piece of history—a vintage postcard.

Several local collectors are on specific missions. Bob Gray watches for picture postcards of Texas lighthouses to brighten up his collection of 150 such cards. Scottish-terrier devotee Linda Bassett laps up illustrated cards of Scotties. Photo buff David Stark snaps up RPCs (Real Photo Cards), one-of-a-kind family shots processed into postcards a century ago.

Robert Brown of Arlington is on his own family quest, searching for a rare photo card of the 1930s ferry boat his grandfather operated in Galveston Bay.

Across the hall, Austin artist Stephanie Lindsey digs for 1940s pictures on textured linen cards. She mounts iconic postcard images—such as the Alamo, the Golden Gate Bridge, and ’57 Chevys—under see-through resin in stylish sterling silver rings, necklaces, and bracelets (see http://babyjane.us). Another local artist, Debbie Little-Wilson, gravitates to cards depicting “strong women”—cowgirls, aviators, suffragettes—who end up in her hand-colored etchings and drawings (www.dlittlewilson.com).

“What keeps us going,” says Debbie’s husband, Ken Wilson, who is a postcard dealer (www.ken-wilson.com), “is looking for a needle in the haystack—that wonderful, even rare postcard that others missed.”

The ultimate haystack sprawls across the front of the hall at Norman Porter’s display of 70,000 postcards, some 10,000 of which are real-photo cards of Texas scenes. Norman helped his hometown of Pleasanton (near San Antonio) restore its railroad depot using early postcards as reference guides. The project hooked the retired principal, so he started attending, then selling and trading at, postcard shows. As chairman of the Atascosa County Historical Commission, Norman used postcards to illustrate the county history book he just completed. “Postcard pictures are all that’s left of many places,” he notes.

Several tables over, another dealer-author, Wallace O. Chariton of Plano, also uses cards to illustrate his Texas-themed books. “My idea of excitement is finding a real-photo card of a Texas ghost town,” he says.

Picture postcards are such valuable research tools that the Texas Historical Commission has a database of several thousand cards to help with architectural restoration. “Postcards offer a visual timeline,” explains Mark Cowan of the THC’s Architecture Division, “to document the historical development of a building.”

Vintage postcards and their messages also offer compelling views of how towns and lifestyles changed, especially during the Golden Age of postcards, roughly 1900 to World War I.

From the January 2007 issue.

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