Postcard enthusiasts 'collect' in Asheboro
By Kerry Kesler
Staff Writer, The Courier-Tribune
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ASHEBORO - Remember the penny postcard? They're back and very collectable.
Buyers and collectors gathered in two conference rooms of the Days Inn on Albemarle Road in Asheboro Saturday to swap stories and buy memories of bygone days and places at what organizers hope will be a semiannual Postcard and Paper Collectables Show.
Dealers will be at Days Inn again today from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m.
Asheboro's first show brought 13 dealers from the United States and Canada, who brought more than 500,000 postcards to sell along with maps, books, stereo view cards, matchbook covers, prints and other items.
William and Linda Mankins, who are in charge of the show, said they wanted to come to Asheboro because the city is centrally located in the state. Visitors traveled from Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia for the show. A fall show is in the works, but a date has not been set.
"There is something here for every collector," William Mankins said Saturday. "We have postcards of state capitols, hometowns, state birds, state flowers. Anything you can imagine can be found on a postcard."
The collection of postcards the Mankins brought to Asheboro for sale numbers around 60,000 cards. The Mankins, and Linda's sister, Rhonda Hinkle, live in Meadows of Dan, Va. They are enthusiastic collectors themselves.
"I collect postcards that have anything to do with (the television series) 'Bonanza'," Linda Mankins said. "I collect Barbie postcards, Tom Selleck postcards, Elvis, and, my favorite cowboy, Roy Rogers postcards. I also collect embroidered postcards."
"I collect tobacco postcards," William said. "I used to pick tobacco when I was younger. Collecting cards with pictures of tobacco barns and fields of tobacco is much easier work."
The Mankins said collecting postcards is an inexpensive hobby. Some postcards can be purchased for as little as a dime. Most cards range in price from $2 to $10, although prices can range much higher for the serious collector.
Jeff Eastland, a dealer from Stafford, Va., said he lost out on a bid for a rare 1932 Negro League postcard which featured a team picture of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. In the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Crawfords fielded a player named Satchel Paige.
"I bid $7,000 for the card," Eastland said. "The bid went to $12,000. The most valuable postcard I know of was a card from Great Britain. It sold for $44,000. Still, collecting postcards is relatively inexpensive compared to other antiques."
Eastland said the earliest postcards were produced in the 1840s, but that it was in the 1870s, when people began to travel by train, that postcards were mass-produced. The "Golden Age" of postcards, Eastland said, occurred between 1907 and 1914.
In 1907, he explained, the United States allowed a person buying a postcard to put a message on the back. The card, and the message, could be mailed for a penny to any place in the country.
According to Eastland, Germany produced most of the postcards sold in the United States. Companies in America sent photographs and prints to Germany for use as postcards because German lithographers were considered the best in the world at the turn of the century.
"Basically, the postcard was an inexpensive and rapid means of communication. You could mail one on one day and the people you were sending it to would receive it the next. The cards traveled by train to the local post office, and the postal carrier would have it in the mail box the day after it was sent."
Eastland explained that the United States also had companies producing postcards, but the quality was not considered a high as the German-produced cards. It was only after America entered World War I that American-made postcards caught up in production with the no-longer-available German postcards.
"Americans had been making postcards since 1893," Eastland said. "They made their appearance at the Columbia Exposition that year. They just weren't as good as the Germans. We had to scramble to come up with the white-border postcard to take the place of the German ones."
Collecting postcards has become a serious hobby for many people. Susan Hoffer McMillan collected enough postcards of scenes from Myrtle Beach from the 1900s up to have a book printed of her collection.
McMillan was at the show selling the book, "Myrtle Beach and Conway in Vintage Postcards," printed by Arcadia Publishing as part of that company's Postcard History Series.
As collectors sat and filed through the myriad of postcards, Dave Sennema and his wife Marty, from Columbia, S.C., said they began collecting postcards for the history the cards contain.
"Most collectors are interested in history," Marty Sennema said. "And they collect postcards as pieces of history."
"Many of the pictures from the past are now found only on postcards," Dave Sennema said.
A quick scan of the two rooms full of postcards at the Days Inn showed postcards with scenes from beaches, battleships, baseball teams and even Nazi-era photos featuring parades of German soldiers saluting Adolph Hitler.
When asked if their table of postcards contained any with scenes from Asheboro, Dave Sennema pointed to a box of neatly filed cards in which were postcards with photographs of local churches, businesses and schools which were made in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
"Postcards are a source of information for me," Marty Sennema said. "What's fun for me is for people to look through the cards, find a picture, and then tell me a story from their childhood."
Marty Sennema said that postcard collecting ranks only behind coin and stamp collecting in the country.
"You don't hear much about postcard collecting because you don't hear about the exorbitant prices like a coin or stamp can bring," Marty Sennema said.
Ernie White, a dealer from Richmond, Va., said that another reason most people haven't heard about postcard collecting in this area is because most postcard photographs were made in Northern states.
"There were fewer postcards printed in the South than in the North," White said. "Up North, you can buy a shoe box full. Postcards from the South are more rare. In Pennsylvania, they have shows every weekend. You might have one every six months down here."