July 19, 2009: It all started a little over a hundred years ago, when young Phil Smith, my great-grandfather, started collecting postcards. Postcards were a recent invention back then, and he got them from various sources. His cousins would drop him a card from the next town over; the cards would be mailed in the morning and get to Phil in the evening, 30 miles away on country roads. Some cards came from his classmates — especially the girls. He even had a couple of cards that came wrapped up inside Hershey Bars.
He added to it occasionally over the years, but the collection never got very large; it seems as though he saved cards which had sentimental value. He kept the cards until his death, when they were passed on to my aunt. I was in the military for most of the time that she had the collection, and would occasionally send her a card from wherever I happened to be; I saved a few for myself, mostly as travel souvenirs. When she passed on herself, her cards (and Phil’s) came to me. By this time, the collection had grown a bit; she stored it in a box which had originally contained 500 #10 business envelopes, from the office supply store.
In 2003, I decided to start putting them online at Wild Postcards. It was still a bit labor-intensive in those days; there were no free database-driven website applications, except for WordPress, which was still kludgy. I started putting up some static web pages, inserting cards in the middle of the site based on where they came from, or what the subject was. By 2005, I no longer had the time to do this on a regular basis, and the site withered and ultimately went away.
Fast-forward to 2008 and, by this time, WordPress rocks. I put up a new site with all the advantages of a blog (new stuff all the time, with the ability to choose an eclectic mix over time) plus the advantages of a database (the ability to categorize and tag postcards for later review).
Among the cards that joined my collection were reproductions of classic pin-up posters and tear sheets, and I dutifully included them in the mix. While nobody was really offended, a few people did express astonishment that I would leave bare breasts on the blog’s front page as the latest new post. Then, Sean McLachlan mentioned Wild Postcards in a post on Gadling (“Postcards from Strangers“, 6 July 2009), praising the site but cautioned that it might occasionally not be suitable for work, based on the inclusion of the vintage pin-ups. (“Nude women with mom hair. Yipe!”)
I’d already had a bee in my bonnet about breaking out the pin-ups into a spin-off blog, and Sean’s comments catalyzed the idea. The world needs a blog dedicated to nude women with mom hair. Well, OK, the vast majority of the postcards here won’t show nude women. But a lot of them will definitely have mom hair.
Most articles on this site contain images of postcards. Occasionally, the image on the postcard in question will be copyrighted, most likely by the publisher of the postcard. However, because this site is primarily for education and commentary on the postcards depicted, that the use of a copyrighted image represents only a small fraction of the website content as a whole, and that the use of the image will have no negative effect on the marketability of any postcards bearing the image, it is believed that the use of any copyrighted images constitutes fair use under U.S. Copyright Law. If you are the copyright holder of an image used on this site and wish to have it removed, please contact me at .
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