Little Thanksgiving Card & Perfin Stamp

This Thanksgiving postcard is signed by the artist Ellen Clapsaddle and published by International Art. It is numbered 1311.

I hope this little card will convey

All that I wish for your Thanksgiving Day:

But somehow or other it seems so small

To think that it could carry them all.

The back of this card is unusual because it was written upside with the address and message in the wrong columns.

The stamp on the back of this card is a perfin. In philately, a perfin is a stamp that has had initials or a name perforated across it to discourage theft. The name is a contraction of perforated initials or perforated insignia. The top twoo letters on this stamp appear to be NW which could be an abbreviation for Northwest or Northwestern. The bottom letter appears to be a G.

Thanksgiving Symbols

This Thanksgiving postcard design includes a little bit of everything. There are the common Thanksgiving symbols of turkeys and plentiful fruit. There are the patriotic symbols of flags and the American Eagle. There are chrysanthemums for Fall and forget-me-nots for remembrance and good luck.

I especially like that baby turkeys (known as poults) are included with Mom and Pop turkey.

Dead Fish & A Postal Shower

I have a lot of Thanksgiving postcards, but I had a hard time choosing one to post on my blog. I wanted to find one with an interesting and readable message as well as a nice image. Most of my postcards are unused. The ones that were used usually say little beyond "Thanks for your postal. I'm sorry I haven't written" or "We are all well, hope you are the same."

Here is the message on the back of this postcard which is postmarked Nov 24, 1909:

Josephine
Don't send for me(?) any fish moss(?). My fish are all dead but one. I would like to see you this morning when you get so many postals. I have told several about you postal shower. Nora.

It was the dead fish that first caught my attention. I had trouble figuring out the last part of the message until I remembered hearing about postal showers. Postal showers were popular in the early twentieth century when postcards were a big fad. They were a way of giving or sending postcards from many people to the same person at the same time. Postal showers seem to have been especially popular for birthdays, but also could occur at other times. Here is a newspaper report of a postal shower that was published in The Kingston Daily Freeman, August 10 1908.

The Lowell, Indiana Library website reported a shower of postal cards sent through the mail in 1910. This item came from Reports of the Historical Secretary of the Old Settler and Historical Association of Lake County, Indiana, from 1906 to1910:

On February 16th, which was the 80th anniversary of the birthday of Mrs. A.D. Palmer, of Lowell, formerly of Creston, she received a "shower" of postal cards. Greeting came to her, it is stated, from three hundred and six relatives and friends living in twenty states, and forty-five towns, including a great-great-grandson, whose card was sent by his parents residing in Hammond. The "postal shower" was a marked success.

Rivals - Eagle vs. Turkey

The American Bald Eagle was chosen to be part of the United States national seal in 1782. Not all were in agreement with this choice. Ben Franklin believed that the turkey would have made a better national symbol. According to Franklin, the eagle is a bird of  bad moral character. He felt that the turkey is a more respectable and courageous bird and would have been a more appropriate symbol.

Devils Tower National Monument Stamp

Devils Tower National Monument,  which is located in northeastern Wyoming, was established on September 24, 1906 as the first U. S. national monument. This stamp, which was issued on September 24, 1956 commemorates the monument's 50th anniversary. Devils Tower rises dramatically 1,267 feet (386 m) above the surrounding terrain, and the summit is 5,112 feet (1,558 m) above sea level. It has a thousand-foot wide base and tapers to 275 feet at its flat summit.

According to Wikipedia, geologists agree that Devils Tower was formed by the intrusion of igneous material, but they cannot agree on how that process took place. As the molten rock cooled, mainly hexagonal columns were formed, and cracks occurred between them. Devils Tower did not visibly protrude above the surface until the softer sedimentary rocks overlying it eroded away. The more resistant igneous rock making up the tower survived the erosional forces, and the columns of Devils Tower began to appear as an isolated mass above the surrounding terrain.

Devils Tower is considered a sacred landmark by many Native American tribes, and Native American folklore includes several stories about its formation. In one story, giant bears spotted some girls who were playing and began to chase them. The girls climbed on a rock in an effort to escape the bear and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. The Great Spirit made the rock rise from the ground towards the heavens so that the bears could not reach the girls. When the bears tried to climb the rock, their claws left deep marks in the sides.

This is a post for Sunday Stamps at Viridian's Postcard Blog

What Are They Reading?

I bought the postcard shown above because I wanted to see what they were reading. I thought it might be something romantic or popular. It turned out to be a copy of STUDIO LIGHT magazine with an ad for Artura photographic paper on the back cover. By looking at other information on the web, I determined that the words below STUDIO LIGHT on the cover say "Incorporating The Aristo Eagle and The Artura Bulletin."  Artura was bought by Eastman Kodak in 1909. Similar Artura ads were used on the back cover in 1916 and possibly earlier.

The front of the postcard is stamped C. L. Merryman, Kerkhoven Minn. on the bottom border.

C. L. Merryman was Charles Lincoln Merryman (1865-1956) who had a studio in Kerkhoven plus a couple of  branches. He owned the Kerkhoven studio from 1893 until 1940. The studio was razed shortly after he sold it. The following information is from Placeography:

Charles Lincoln Merryman is originally from Bangor, Maine. He was born in 1865, and he evidently took to photography at an early age: He was running his own photo shop in Bangor when he was still a teenager. In 1884 Merryman went to Boston where he spent the next eight years working for the Blair Camera Company. In 1892 he moved to Kerkhoven, and for several months he operated a photo studio there out of a tent. In 1893 Merryman purchased the building pictured here on 11th street, and he remodeled it to accommodate a photo studio by extending the building and adding skylights to it. Merryman ran this photography business for nearly fifty years, and he eventually had two satellite studios in Sunberg and Spicer Minnesota.

I found some very interesting photos of Merryman's studio on the Minnesota Historical Society website. The first is a postcard advertising the studio.

A photo of the Merryman studio interior below shows the same background (on the right) that was used for my postcard.

Another photo of the studio interior, that I found especially interesting, is one of the Post Card Station promoting photo postcards.

The Minnesota Historical Society also has another Merryman photo of a Man Reading. Though the image isn't very clear, it looks like the man could also be reading Studio Light.

I discovered another "reading" photo by Merryman that was used on the cover of the book In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants. The woman who is reading may be sitting in the same fancy chair shown in the photo of Merryman's studio interior. (The image of the book cover is from Amazon, and the original image is credited to the Minnesota Historical Society)

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Service Men's Telephone Centers

This postcard was furnished for the use of service men at a telephone center at Camp Grant in Illinois. It has the following description on the front of the card:

This Telephone Center is like one I visited today. Because copper for new wire has gone to war, existing lines are crowded with war calls. So telephone operators and a manager are here at Camp Grant to help get our calls through. That's why it's easier for me to call you than for you to call me.

The soldier who sent this postcard was named Paul C. Muehl. His Army enlistment information can be found here. The postcard was mailed "Free" with a sweet message of love on the back:

Dearest Nancy:
Just finished talking to you and your voice was so sweet to hear again. Honey, please love me back as much as I love you, will ya?
Love, Paul

 

This postcard was mailed on August 11, 1945. By that time, WWII was just about over. The end of war in Asia occurred on August 14 and 15, 1945, when armed forces of Japan surrendered to the forces of the Allied Powers. That surrender came just over three months after the end of war in Europe.

When I searched the internet for other WWII telephone centers, I was surprised to find a "twin" for my army postcard. I am showing the two cards together below. Everything is the same on the two cards except for the uniforms that the men are wearing and the name of the base. Great Lakes is a Naval station, also in Illinois.

Below I have a 1943 photo from the Library of Congress of the telephone room at the United Nations service center, Washington, D.C. It looks like all the women in this photo and on the postcards have the same hairstyle.

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