Friday, April 29, 2011

Greetings from Lorain Postcards


I saw this undated postcard on Ebay the other day. I had never seen this particular one before. It combines two other fairly easy-to-find postcards into one, with some distinctive type.

What's strange is that the Broadway scene on the bottom half of this postcard is identified on its own postcard as "Broadway and Main." Huh?

This other 'Greetings' postcard (below) was there on Ebay as well. It was postmarked 1974 – which makes me wonder if the person who mailed it had pulled it out of a scrapbook that belonged to their grandparents.


Here's a few more versions; first, one postmarked around 1940 with a somewhat Art Deco feeling.


Here's one from the 1970's that I remember stocking up on at the drug store (four for a dollar back then). I used them to keep in touch with my college roommates over the summer. 


(I'll never forget when one of my roommates came to Lorain for a visit while we were on break from Ohio State; after showing him around my west side neighborhood, which had been farmland only a little more than a decade before, he nicknamed my hometown "Treeless Lorain." The above postcard reinforces that moniker!)

Lastly, here's one last variation that I never saw before. It's from the CardCow vintage postcard website (and it's for sale). According to its website, CardCow.com is one of the largest online postcard dealers.


I kind of like the red type used on this postcard; it reminds me of the font used on the end credits of many TV shows from the 1960's.

3 comments:

-Alan D Hopewell said...

Those are beautiful; I remember the Pool Palace on Broadway sold a lot of Lorain Postcards, although as a kid, I couldn't imagine why anyone would want one.

Randall Chet said...

Hi Dan-

As a fellow designer I love Greetings postcards. Can you still get them around town? Does anybody send postcards anymore? A good designer can whip these up pretty easily these days - and the cost of printing has dropped to just about nothing. Hmmm I might just spend an evening working on one!

Dan Brady said...

Hi Randall,

I haven't seen any Lorain postcards for quite a while (the 1980's?)--so maybe there's a good opportunity for an enterprising designer like you! (I was actually thinking of making some up for Sheffield Lake, because a clerk at the Rite Aid in town told me that someone came into the store recently at Shoreway hoping to buy a SL postcard!)