A postcard sent from Ionia to Webberville –July 4, 1910
Dear cousin
“I’m having a nice time. There was a big fire here this forenoon and we went and saw it but I was afraid.”
Percy
One hundred years ago the nation was all atwitter with a new fangled form of communication-the penny postcard- sending millions of cards each year via the U.S. Postal Service.
“It was the Twitter of that generation,” Valerie Marvin, president of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing said.
“Not only were postcards small, limiting the writer to a brief message, but they were also the most public form of mail, as everyone who saw the postcard could read it,” she said.
Lansing Power Plant
The Historical Society of Greater Lansing is hosting four Lansing area collectors to discuss collectible Lansing and MSU area cards and the history of postcards 7 p.m., Thursday, November 21 at the Turner Dodge House, 100 East North St., Lansing.
Included on the program are Peggy Metzger, a long-time East Lansing collector of downtown Lansing postcards; Ray Walsh, proprietor of East Lansing’s Archives Book Shop and Curious Book Shop, Harry Emmons, Lansing collector specializing in early automotive history and Stephen Terry, Williamston, who collects MAC, MSC and MSU postcards. Each collector will discuss and show specific cards from their collections which illustrate the history of postcards in the Lansing area.
When postcards were first proposed in Germany as early as 1865 the whole idea of people writing private messages that everyone could read seemed radical and was quickly dropped. Today, those Germans would be apoplectic to see what is sent everyday on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. They’d probably like Snapchat. However, the concept of sending of postcards with personal, periodic updates often with one-of-a-kind photographs certainly was the precursor to communication on the web, Marvin said.
“Postcards were also the poor man’s letter. They were cheap, easy to send and disposable,” she said.
She pointed out that even though postcards were cheap and disposable, people at the time treated them as pleasant memories and saved them which has resulted in a vigorous collectible market for postcards.
“Some of our most treasured memories are remembered in an iconic postcard,” she said.
