San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Collector’s 10,000 vintage postcards show city’s history.
Collector has 10,000 vintage views of the past, from grim to glorious
Joseph Cooper admits he has “a bad addiction” to the more picturesque history of San Antonio. That would explain the more than 10,000 vintage postcards he’s been collecting for decades.
For half his life, the 53-year-old Alamo City native has collected various 4-by 6-inch portraits of his hometown, some more than a century old. The postcards spotlight all sorts of landmarks in old San Antonio, from enduring hallmarks like the Alamo and the River Walk to gone-but-notforgotten haunts like Joske’s and Playland Park.
The dictionary calls it deltiology, the study and collection of postcards. You can just call it being puro postal for San Antonio.
He feels drawn to the images on the postcards. “I like the view into history,” said Cooper, who showcases his postcards on his website, The Alamo City (thealamocity .com).
But Cooper, who owns a company that provides loans to those who need legal services, also finds the messages written by the senders just as fascinating.
“The one thing I hear all the time is people look at them and (say), ‘I can’t believe the hand
writing. It’s so beautiful.’ We’ve lost that personal connection, that someone took the time to buy a card, write it, put a stamp on it and put it in a mailbox. As opposed to just taking a picture and sending it out somewhere.”
Cooper noted that postcards also offer insights into the human condition you just don’t get on social media.
“Just thinking about what that person was doing when they wrote it, and who it went to,” Cooper said. “You’ll see a run of cards or a collection of cards that were sent between a grandfather and his grandson over the years. And somebody held on to those. Just the life story. It’s very, very real.”
The majority of Cooper’s postcards capture San Antonio from the early to late 1900s, showcasing the city’s cultural heritage and diversity. Some are written in Spanish and German. And plenty highlight the city’s signature celebrations, such as HemisFair ’68 and so many Fiesta floats and horse-drawn carriages from across the decades.
One of the oldest postcards in Cooper’s collection, the “Souvenir of San Antonio,” is an 1899-postmarked card with colorful illustrations of the Alamo, Mission Concepcion and Mission San José, which was printed in Germany the year prior.
The message itself has just as much historical significance. Arthur Guenther, the son of flour mill magnate C.H. Guenther,sent the postcard to his own son Hilmar in Germany to add to his own postcard collection.
The “Souvenir” card connected Cooper with Richard Eisenhour, a fellow postcard buff at the State Preservation Board in Austin, after Cooper
outbid Eisenhour on the postcard on eBay. Eisenhour hounded the seller to connect him with the guy who beat him, and after he was successful, the two became friends.
“It’s the earliest known Texas tourist postcard,” Eisenhour said of the “Souvenir” card. “And Joseph has it.”
Eisenhour has collected postcards for more than 40 years. He’s currently working on a book about Texas’ earliest postcards, a good portion of which involves Cooper’s postcards.
“Comprehensive. That’s the word (for Cooper’s collection),” Eisenhour said. “It’s extremely diverse.”
On the lighter side is a pair of postcards with black-and-white photos of conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, who were billed as the San Antonio Siamese Twins in 1920s vaudeville.
One is an autographed, unmailed postcard of the sisters holding saxophones. Cooper has no
idea which sister signed it, “Sincerely yours Daisy & Violet Hilton,” on the back.
The other postcard features the sisters in dresses with big bows in their hair. Although it was never mailed, the message on the back, dated Sept. 20, 1922, is addressed to Grace and Irene.
There’s no signature, but the writer seemed to know a lot about the Hiltons, reporting that the sisters’ mother had died, and that a “very nice appearing lady” was now caring for them. The message also reports that the twins “would not want to be separated if that were possible.”
On the grimmer end is a postcard with a photo of a dead horse slumped on the sidewalk of a Crockett Street storefront, a victim of the 1921 flood that swept through downtown San Antonio. A note underneath the image reads, “Horse pulled out of basement.”
Even creepier than the image, the postcard was
sent unsigned, with no message to Miss Hortense Fox in Richmond, Va., sometime in the 1920s
(the last digit on the postmark is missing.)
It’s one of several postcards in Cooper’s collection with images from the devastating 1913 and 1921 San Antonio floods.
And talk about your postcards from the edge. Some grim black-andwhite photo postcards show the aftermath of the 1913 and 1921 floods that swept through downtown San Antonio. Most of these stark images feature devastated roadways and shell-shocked citizens wading through knee-high water.
Cooper safeguards these lithographic and chrome-colored wonders in clear plastic sleeves, most of them filed in small steel cabinets made for index cards, in a secure closet in an undisclosed location. Others fill boxes at his Shavano Park home, where his wife, Catherine, cheers on his collecting.
Cooper’s collection started 25 years ago, when he came across a scrapbook of old San Antonio postcards at the City-Wide Vintage Sale in Austin. That find soon led to postcard shows, then dealer contacts.
“Way before eBay,” Cooper said.
Now in addition to eBay, Cooper relies on “pickers,” basically three or four dealers and a couple of individuals who scour estate sales for postcards and other relics to flip on the secondary market. He also gets a helping hand from his wife.
“I end up finding more postcards for him than he does,” wife Catherine said. “That’s my go-to gift. I just kind of comb everywhere. And that’s fun for me. I love that.”
Postcards as we know them today date back to 1861, when Congress passed an act that allowed privately printed cards to be mailed.
Postcards didn’t really take off until the 1890s, when souvenir postal cards, considered the first picture postcards, showed up at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and at other expos.
Stamped postcards peaked in 1990 with more than 2.8 billion mailed, according to the United States Postal Service.
Then as email usage grew, mailing postcards declined. By the end of 2019, the most recent figures by the USPS, Americans mailed only 563 million stamped cards and postcards combined.
As for how much those postcards of yesteryear sell for today, expect small prices to match that small correspondence.
The earliest picture postcards, which date back to the 1890s, may sell for around $25 each. Most postcards from the early-1900s heyday may ring up around $5 to $10 each.
The most Cooper ever paid for a postcard was $175, though he was willing to bid up to $1,500 on eBay for that 1899 “Souvenir of San Antonio” postcard. He ended up getting it for just $2.
Cooper is still deciding on an inheritance plan for the collection. His two adult sons are safe from burden, and Cooper said Eisenhour is begging him to share his collection with the state archives.
“I don’t know,” Cooper said. “I’d love to see it stay in San Antonio.”
In the meantime, Cooper plans to just keep collecting postcards of the San Antonio that used to be, all while still sending postcards from anywhere else he and his wife travel. “To get something that’s written by a person or a loved one is still significant,” Cooper said. “It’s a lot of fun.”
And like so many other saved postcards from the past, they’re bound to make future collectors wish they were there, too.