MARIEMONT, Ohio (AP) – Her Majesty, the Queen of Postcards, surveyed her subjects.
Dozens of postcards lounged atop a bedspread. Thousands upon thousands more stood at attention in filing cabinets lining the spare bedroom of her Mariemont manor. The queen’s holdings make up one of the area’s largest private accumulations. Rivaling the size of public collections, they offer lessons on the power of the postcard and the history of Cincinnati.
“Where is she?” asked the queen, aka Esther H.M. Power, as she looked through her cards.
“The H.M.,” she joked as she continued her search, “stands for ‘Her Majesty!’” With a laugh, she acted as if she were straightening a crown.
Bending over, she took a closer look at the postcards. Her hands flitted from stack to stack.
“Aha!” she cried out. Her hands gently lifted a rare vintage postcard.
“This is my favorite,” she declared. “And would you know: That is Esther!”
She pointed to herself on the postcard as a 7-year-old at a camp in the Adirondacks during the summer of 1932. She sits cross-legged on the ground with a group of schoolgirls.
“I don’t sit like that anymore,” she said. Her 86-year-old legs won’t bend that way anymore.
She looked at the card and then held it close to her heart. “This got me started with postcards.”
At first, she was struck by the stamps on the cards. Then, she noticed the scenes. As she grew older, she marveled at how much sentiment could fit in such small a space.
Holding the cards and reading their greetings, she talked about the thrill of getting a postcard. These pieces of paper with a scene on one side and a few lines on the other come from someone far away who is thinking of you. She may be at a café in Paris. He may be in a museum in Chicago. Either way, they have taken the time to dash off a note: “Greetings from . . . wish you were here.”
“And when you get that postcard,” Power said, “you look at the scene and feel like you are there in Paris or Chicago. And, that person is right next to you.”
Seven decades since she went to summer camp and thousands of postcards later, Her Majesty rules over an ever-growing realm. And yet, Power insists she is not a deltiologist, a collector of postcards.
“This is my accumulation room,” she said with a regal wave of her hand pointing to the filing cabinets.
“I am an accumulator, not a collector.”
She is a fibber. Her accumulation would be the envy of most collections.
She neatly files her postcards, alphabetizing them within subjects and preserving them in acid-free sleeves. They date from the turn of the century as the 19th became the 20th. They come in several languages. Some depict world history.
“Here’s one of the Titanic,” she said as she reached for one of her greatest hits. “The ship sank in April 1912. This postcard came out in August 1912 in France as a memorial to the tragedy.”
Thousands of her postcards show local scenes. They trace Cincinnati’s development from a river town ruled by steamboats to the town of today serviced by passenger jets and laced by interstates.
The postcards show the city at work and at play. Every Cincinnati Reds ballpark appears in her accumulation. She plucked one example at random from a filing cabinet.
The Palace of the Fans, the Reds’ home from 1902 to 1911, popped out in its full-color glory on a surface made to look and feel like linen. On the opposite side, a note, written May 16, 1910, reads:
“Dear Daisy, Please tell your pa to send Gusie a load of hay just as soon as he can. Hope you are well. Love, Your friend, Ella Sue.”
She made no mention of the Reds. They won that day at home. Beat the Brooklyn Superbas 3 to 2.
Power, a historian, can’t say how many postcards she has accumulated since 1932.
“Oh my heavens, no,” the postcard queen replied when asked if she has conducted a recent census of her subjects.
She knows the number has passed the 10,000 mark. Thousands of those contain images of trains and boats and planes and even a horse—the steed Ulysses S. Grant rode at the end of the Civil War—named after Cincinnati.
“They were great marketing tools to promote the city,” Power said. “You could see the name Cincinnati on the rails, on the river, in the air and in the history books.”
The size of her accumulation compares favorably with public collections. The Cincinnati Historical Society’s postcard holdings number 8,500-plus. The Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County had 43,368 postcards the last time its collection was tallied in 2001. Of that number, 15,917 postcards depict Greater Cincinnati scenes. The library’s holdings come from four separate sources.
The world’s largest collection of postcards sits 40 miles north of Chicago. The Curt Teich Postcard Archives contains “over one million postcards,” said Heather Johnson, archives coordinator. “We have only cataloged 400,000.”
Teich owned the world’s largest postcard company. He could afford to collect these small works of art, Johnson said, that were “on the wane by the 1930s—their heyday was in the `20s–as families were able to afford cameras.”
When told of the size of Power’s collection, Johnson paused. “That,” she said, “is pretty large for a private collection.”
She wanted to know Power’s plans for her postcards.
“Good question,” Power said. She planned to leave her postcards to her son, Paul Power Jr. But, he passed away in July.
“He helped me so much with the postcards,” said his proud mom. “It was only right that they go to him. Now, I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.”
For the time being, she plans to keep accumulating and promoting the use of postcards.
“I read stories in the paper about how we must find ways to market the city,” she said.
“They spend money forming committees on how to bring people into Cincinnati as visitors instead of getting them to come here and live.”
She had a money-saving suggestion.
“Just send a postcard,” Power said. “It would be a lot cheaper.”
The postcards, she suggested, would contain this message: “Greetings from Cincinnati, the Queen City of the West. Wish you were here to stay.”
___
Information from: The Cincinnati Enquirer, http://www.enquirer.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-10-09-11 1650GMT