On vacations in the past, I was usually the last one to pick up postcards to send back home to friends and family. I always saw it as a major interruption of a period when I was supposed to be relaxing.
I can still remember my friends searching the metal turn racks in souvenir shops looking for the perfect cards to mail, and then searching for a post office or mail drop to send off their cute and inspiring messages – “Having fun. Wish you were here.”
Along with the postcards were the tons of photos that we’d all snap and have developed when we got back home. That was probably easy compared to how folks before us had done it.
On the auction tables, I’ve come across the ways they had done it. I see those memories of long-gone vacations in various forms: box after box after heavy box of Kodak slides; single postcards from states, hotels, attractions and foreign lands, and large and small booklets of postcards.
I used to come across the slides pretty often, probably because families were unloading them. I understood; usually there were so many there was no way or where to store them. But I don’t see them as often or in bulk anymore.
I found these mementos intriguing because they represented the culture more than 50 years ago. Kodak had made it easy to snap a photo with its cheap and economical cameras, and postcard companies were pushing out millions of the paper greetings each year. They told the stories of our travels in a medium far different from how we do it today. With our smart phones, we can instantly send photos of great statutes or beautiful mountain vistas without writing a word.
We can recount where we stayed, what we ate and what we saw on a WordPress blog that we set up in three easy steps. We can just call from our smart phones to say hello, wish you were here. Or we can tweet our trip or post photos to Facebook or Instagram, and with tools like Social follow, which gives us followers, it’s not as if we are only talking to the people back home anymore.
With these here-now-and-gone-in-a-flash moments, what will we have to later show for our good times? What will our children and families have to remember where we journeyed to, how we got there and what we saw. Does it matter, since they will likely just toss them anyway?
How many of us even send postcards anymore? I suspect that their heyday may have come and gone and the only people interested in them are collectors. I found in Googling that postcard-collecting was, in fact, a popular hobby. Postcards have been around since the mid-19th century – the first official one was issued in Austria in 1869. They were first issued in this country in 1873 solely by the Postal Service, but that had changed by the turn of the century. They were especially popular here in the early 1900s.
In subsequent years, the look of the postcard changed, from white border to linen to chrome cards. Real photo postcards – which used actual photographs rather than drawings – were first used around 1899, and gained their popularity through George Eastman and his easy-to-use Kodak cameras.
The ones I came across at auction were not necessarily of collector grade, although I found some lovely linen cards.
Along with postcards, vacation slides were apparently a big hit. A few years ago I picked up a box of slides that contained a narrative account of a family’s cross-country trip to a Boy Scouts’ camp and training center in Cimarron, NM. The author of the narrative – written in pencil on yellow notebook paper – was the father, who was likely the one who took the photos and had them developed into slides.
“Let me tell you about our family’s trip to Philmont Scout Ranch,” he began the narrative. “It all began in January when my wife read an article in Scouting magazine about such a trip.” They got permission to attend a district administrative course and began planning their trip.
There’s no clear picture of where they lived, but they started out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, indicating they lived in the state. The family – including a grandmother and grandson – set out on a Saturday in the middle of August 1958, going through a total of 13 states there and back and clocking 4,966 miles. A car with air conditioner was the best way to make the trip, he wrote.
He dubbed the trip “an unqualified success.”
At another auction, I picked up a box and metal container of slides and reels, a vintage Postoscope projector and a 1950s Argus projector, and a nice Barnett & Jaffe Baja slide case to hold them. A business card in the box held the name Roburt Andre Dumas and the employer Catholic Relief Service. The name handwritten on the slide boxes was Robert Dumas. The slides consisted of photos of Africa and Mexico, among other places, along with personal occasions like parties and holidays.
On the web, I found references to a Roburt A. Dumas, a foreign service official who in 1973 helped form the Thursday Luncheon Group to promote greater participation of blacks in the foreign service. That same year, he had been named chief of foreign service personnel for the United States Information Agency (USIA), one of two African Americans to hold senior positions in the agency for the first time. He had been the public affairs officer for the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia, before being named to the USIA post.
I’m not sure what to do with the boxes of slides and reels – just like the family members who put the boxes up for auction. I suppose I could donate them.
How do you chronicle your vacation trips? Do you send postcards, photos or do you email?
