COLLECTIBLES
‘Wish you were here’
38
BY ALISON O’LEARY
JOHN CARVELLI COLLECTION
Racks of postcards were once in the doorways of every pharmacy and trinket shop, but now they’re hard to find thanks to texting, Instagram, and other
forms of electronic messaging. The style above became popular around 1950, when emigration to the Sunshine State started to boom.
Old-time postcards, precursors of Twitter,
helped recruit new Floridians
One hundred years ago there was something in
the water in White City, the Danish settlement
outside of Fort Pierce — or at least that’s
what the postcards of the era would have you
think because many of the images sent from the tiny
community included couples kissing — pretty racy stuff
for the time.
Postcards were the selfies and status updates of days
gone by, purchased and mailed for a mere cent in the
early 1900s, when they were sold in some 80,000 retail
outlets across the country.
While their usage peaked at 675 million mailed in 1908
according to U.S. Postal Service historians, postcards had
many purposes beyond sharing vacation scenes. These
included sending shopping lists and planning rendezvous,
as well as playing a role in recruiting for growing
Florida communities.
Like antique washboards, roller-skate keys and record
players, postcards that were once part of everyday life
have been relegated to collectors’ items that are now
bought and sold for historical or sentimental value. The
once-ubiquitous memento of travel is hard to find, except
at specialized shows for collectors.
In his 25-year-old collection of Treasure Coast postcards,
Port St. Lucie City Commissioner John Carvelli has
many that date back to the first decade of the 20th cen- >>