At the first meeting of the year for the Akron Postcard Club, 23 people gathered in a classroom at the University of Akron’s Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. The meeting started with a genealogy presentation from member Rhonda Rinehart. She began to research her great-uncle Jay Pinnick after coming across a military photo postcard of him from World War I in her mom’s basement.
She found photos of his childhood home, a postcard he sent during the war, his obituary and his death certificate, which said he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“I was just so blown away,” Rinehart said of finding the postcard. “There’s just something about this photo, and knowing what I know about him later, that he killed himself because he was gassed in the war. I look at that, and I just think, ‘That’s a whole person’s life in this one postcard.’”
After Rinehart’s presentation, the group delved into the night’s theme: puzzles and poetry. Armed with glue sticks, old magazines and photocopies of old postcards, attendees created their own postcards.
Akron Postcard Club meetings are often a mix of educational and hands-on activities. Past meetings have looked at the secret messages of postcards, illicit postcards and the history of Akron through postcards.
“The vision really was to get other people of like minds together to learn and explore postcards, their history, the past and present, collecting, receiving, all the things to do with postcards,” said Jennifer Bazar, assistant director of the Cummings Center and cofounder of the Akron Postcard Club. “How can we learn about postcards through that, but also share our … excitement about getting a postcard in the mail or growing our collection or whatever it is?”
Cummings Center houses extensive postcard collection
In 2007, the Cummings Center received a unique gift: a donation of postcards from retired psychologist David Campbell.
The center continued to receive donations from Campbell until 2014, putting the total number of postcards in its collection at around 250,000.
In its early days, the collection was mainly used as a tool for researchers and students interested in archival work.
“It’s a really rich resource for all sorts of different possibilities,” Bazar said.
At the time, graduate student assistant Cris Shell was organizing the Campbell collection and planning programming around it. When Bazar came into her role in April 2021, she and Shell realized they shared a love of postcards.
“After some bouncing back and forth, we decided that there must be other people who like postcards out there in the world,” she said. “So we decided to establish the Akron Postcard Club.”
The club started in July 2021 and meets the last Wednesday of every month, except for November and December.
The first postcard was issued in 1869 in Austria-Hungary. It would take until the early 20th century for postcards to hit the height of their popularity. Bazar said 1905 to 1915 was the “Golden Age of Postcards” — when millions of cards were printed, sold, mailed and collected.
While the sending of postcards waned over the years, collecting postcards — known as deltiology — remains a popular hobby.
For many, postcard collecting is a family affair
Member Nancy Henry grew up accompanying her postcard dealer parents to postcard auctions. In 1998, during the early days of the internet, her father enlisted her help in selling some of their postcards online. It was a trial-and-error process for Henry.
“The very first one I put on, I thought it was a really cool postcard, and it was from California, and it showed a restaurant. And I think in the heading I may have put, ‘rare postcard from California,’” Henry recalled. “And within a day, I had an email back from a guy saying, ‘Miss, this is not a rare postcard. I probably have 10 of them.’ So I learned my lesson that I really needed to go to school when it came to postcards. So in the future, any other cards I posted, I would interview my dad to find out, all right, how do I describe this thing?”
Today, Henry has about 100,000 postcards, including some that belonged to her dad. She loves photo postcards and collects ones featuring Silver Lake Park, the amusement park that existed from 1876 to 1917.
Like Henry, several Akron Postcard Club members cited familial connections when discussing their interest in postcards. At one table, Rose Vance-Grom sat next to her mother, Colleen Hirsch. Vance-Grom worked with the Campbell collection during her time as a history graduate student at the University of Akron. She joined the postcard club a couple years ago, and her mother began attending last September.
Vance-Grom isn’t a big postcard collector. For her, the community is what keeps her coming to Akron Postcard Club.
“We’re all just excited, and it’s like a bunch of nerdy people, hanging out,” she said. “It’s a good time. [Bazar] always has something creative for us to do.”
The camaraderie between members is also what drew member Brian Kay in — and keeps him coming every month from his home in Cleveland.
“This group is new. … We’re just all learning, and it’s just a big free-for-all,” he said. “There’s variety, and there’s no snobbery, because nobody attempts to be king of the postcard.”
