Birds twitter and trees quiver in the summer breeze outside the old Dutch colonial farmhouse in Wauconda. A wood sign out front reads, ”Open by appointment only.”
Inside, the place has the cool, quiet feel of a bank, the orderliness of a library and the low profile of an FBI secret files office.
The phone rings and it could be an editor from Vogue or American Heritage magazines. Or a famous author. Or someone from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.. Or just a woman from Minnesota.
Drive over the rolling green hills and past the geese in the Lakewood Forest Preserve and you`ll find the white farmhouse that houses the Curt Teich Postcard Archives, a place better known nationally than locally.
The faces and places on Teich postcards have been used in an introductory spot for ”Late Night with David Letterman,” for a ”Real Life with Jane Pauley” segment on the American family and in a videotape on the Harlem Globetrotters.
Postcards, you ask? Those cheap, stiff cards with the picture on front?
Those bothersome things everyone tells you to send while you`re on vacation?
Those things that clutter your desk drawer, yet for some reason you don`t throw them out?
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
But these are not just any postcards and this is not just any collection. All of 360,000 postcards in the farmhouse, along with the original photos and other materials, were produced by the king of all postcard companies, the Curt Teich Co. of Chicago.
The company`s German immigrant founder, Curt Teich, set out in 1898 to make plenty of money, which he did. But along the way, his salesmen-photographers fanned out across the country and unintentionally wound up chronicling American culture up to the mid 1970s, when the company went bankrupt and closed after being sold by the Teich family.
Instead of giving big play to the amazing attractions displayed on postcards today, such as the lights of Las Vegas or the skyline of Chicago, the Teich postcards captured everyday Americana, from where people ate to how they had fun.
The heyday of his father`s company was during the Depression, said Ralph Teich of Lake Forest. ”People would buy postcards from Antioch if they got a chance to go up for a picnic.”
Presiding over this collection is Katherine Hamilton-Smith, curator of the archives.
She has been surrounded by those sometimes horrible, sometimes sweet and sometimes hilarious images since 1982, when the postcards were donated to the Lake County Museum by Regensteiner Corp., which bought the assets of the bankrupt company. She was 27, a native Nebraskan living in Hyde Park and a medieval art history major just out of graduate school when she was hired as an archivist of the collection.
Though professing ignorance about postcards, Hamilton-Smith was given a $500,000 Teich Foundation grant, a building with nothing in it and permission to organize as she pleased. She still remembers watching as five semi-tractor trailers pulled up outside the farmhouse.
Her husband, architectural photographer Jess Smith, said, ”Katherine, I think, was a wonderful find because she has a sort of spontaneous energy for things she gets involved in. … This could be a pretty dry subject if it`s not handled right.”
Workmen unloaded wood file after wood file until it was decided two new floor reinforcements were needed to support the weight. With the wood came the musty old museum smell that Hamilton-Smith set about clearing away.
It was two years of cleaning and organizing before the archives opened to the public as a research facility. The cataloging of postcards into a computer index, however, was just completed in January.
The postcards are organized into 1,600 major and minor categories, from funeral supplies to cosmetics. The archives, which is open Monday through Friday, received 1,264 requests for information last year, most of which came by mail or phone.
Hamilton-Smith, who is assisted by three part-time staff at the archives, lives in Lake Forest, loves to illustrate, voraciously reads 19th-Century English novels and admits to being quite a fan of minutiae and organization. As a child, her family took to the road, visiting the kind of small-town places photographed by the Teich Co. ”I have a great affection for that `50s and `60s roadside, middle American, Baby Boom era,” she said.
She earned a degree at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Though set on a doctorate, Katherine ran out of money while attending the University of Chicago and settled in 1982 for a master`s degree in art history. The job hunt began, and she soon spotted the advertisement for an archivist.
Hamilton-Smith is now a full-time cheerleader for the archives, accepting 20 to 30 speaking engagements a year.
Jess Smith said, ”People didn`t respect what she was doing initially. She had to sort of convince them. What she does is allow the images to win people over themselves.”
When Joan Hostetler, exhibits coordinator of the Indiana Historical Society, first saw Hamilton-Smith`s name and title listed on an agenda at a seminar, ”I thought, `Oh, postcards. That doesn`t sound very interesting.”` Having since used cards from the collection, her attitude has changed:
”I just think they show a great amount of creativity for a postcard collection.”
And the words of praise for Hamilton-Smith and the collection just keep coming.
”It has become possibly the greatest picture file of 20th-Century American history,” said Mark Pascale, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Pascale said he was so inspired by the Teich images that he traveled around the country looking for those main streets of the past.
”It`s a marvel,” agreed Lake Forest College history professor Michael H. Ebner, who used numerous postcard images in his book ”Creating Chicago`s North Shore, A Suburban History.”
”The collection is gaining visibility and recognition across the United States and even internationally,” Ebner said.
Rows of metal filing cases hold about 526 albums full of images such as the white gazebo in the town square of Cambridge Springs, Pa.
Then there`s ”The largest drugstore in Oak Cliff (Texas)” with ”10 clerks, 5 phones, 5 delivery boys;” the red brick post office in Beeville, Tex.; and pink-cheeked beauties in fashionable wool bathing shorts, tops and stockings on the beaches of Galveston, Tex., Savannah, Ga., and Hampton Beach, N.H.
”There`s a kind of innocence about them,” said Hamilton-Smith. ”We`re constantly surprised and charmed by what we see.”
And sometimes repulsed, she added. Teich photographers did such a good job of mirroring society that they caught not so innocent images such as that of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen on a parade float.
Another postcard, dated 1945, depicts the cartoon of a woman saying,
”No, no, nix!” to a man to whom she`s just given a black eye. The man laments, ”Met a gal here who speaks several languages, but I prefer `em dumb.”
More grisly is the view of flies buzzing around human corpses. The caption reads, ”Dead at the light plant after the battle of Matamoros, Mexico, June 4, 1913.”
That was the same year the Teich company used a picture taken in Dover, Del., of a black man chained to a whipping post.
”The fact that it was a postcard in a 10-cent store says a lot about what our society was like at that time,” Jess Smith said. ”They were just published as a matter of course. Today they raise the hair on the back of your neck.”
John Baeder, a painter from Tennessee who used Teich postcards in his book ”Gas, Food and Lodging,” remembers visiting the archives several years ago. ”It was insane. I could have stayed there for three months. It`s all this history wrapped up in this little packet, and to me, that`s glorious.”
Hostetler agreed, saying her favorite postcard shows the D&A Auto Court in Indiana with flower boxes under the windows of each cabin.
”It did capture just a moment that is gone,” she said. ”I can imagine people driving by and saying, `Why don`t we stop here.”`
One of the more interesting requests was for postcards featuring alligators for an exhibit honoring the creature at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, Hamilton-Smith said.
The search turned up a favorite for Vaughan Glasgow, director of special projects for the museum: a very real-looking cartoon of alligators propped up on their tails in a circle with music sheets in their hands, just singing away. ”How very funny they are,” Glasgow said.
Ebner said the archive`s success is really due to Hamilton-Smith`s organization, which makes the collection very accessible to scholars. ”I`ll say this, I think her checkbook might be in order.”
”It`s a pleasing place to work for a researcher,” agreed Ann Durkin Keating from the Public Works Historical Society in Chicago. ”Most archives are less than user-friendly.”
