Paul Wilson: Hamilton, pretty as a postcard, stars in new show
The man who’s about to launch an exhibition of vintage postcards has a confession to make.
"I’ve never sent a postcard in my life," says Graham Crawford, of HIStory + HERitage on James North, Hamilton’s only storefront museum.
"I’m selfish," Crawford says. "I love to get them, but I never return the favour."
It’s hard work sending a postcard. You’re in Rome and you want to tell your friends all about it. You need their postal addresses. You need the cards. You need the stamps, the right ones for mail to Canada. And you need a post box. You’ll be lucky if the card gets to Canada before your return.
Or you can pull out your smart phone, snap a shot of yourself in front the Trevi fountain, post it on Facebook or Twitter, and have 10 rave reviews in three minutes.
But there was a time — before social media, before the telephone — when everyone sent postcards. And that is the era Crawford covers in his latest show at H+H.
Wishing You Were Here?
He’ll display hundreds of Hamilton postcards on six monitors, divided into six categories: Downtown, Schools and Churches, Industry and Retail, Waterfront, Streets, Mountain. The images float past, accompanied by a soundtrack that’s bound to carry you away.
Crawford calls the show Wishing You Were Here? "I think people will see these images," he says, "and they’ll think, ‘I wish it was like that still.’"
Though he sent no postcards, he knows his parents did. They had brought their young family here from England and wanted to show the new land to friends over there. So off went images of Gore Park, the Mountain, Dundurn Castle. Probably none of Stelco.
The new show came about when videographer Jon Soyka dropped by H+H and told Crawford about the Golden Horseshoe Post Card Club. Soyka is president.
He got hooked on postcards about 20 years while researching for a video on iceboats. He’s ended up with what he figures is the finest collection anywhere of iceboat postcards — 265 of them, Russian, Dutch, American and, yes, old images shot in Hamilton.
Penny for a postcard
The postcard really hit its peak in the first few decades of the 1900s. Buy one for a penny, send it for a penny more. And you knew it would get there. Hamilton, for instance, had twice-daily delivery six days a week. (It dropped to once a day in 1951, and they cut out Saturdays in 1969.)
So the postcard was nearly as good as the phone, which hadn’t yet made it into most homes. Send a card out in the morning to let your aunt across town know you’d be there for dinner that night and she’d get it in time to put the chicken in the pot.
Soyka explains that nearly all the postcards before World War One were made in Germany, which had the top printing plants. A Hamilton photographer would shoot the incline railway, or the hospital, or City Hall and send his best black-and-white prints to Germany.
"They would do a superb job over there," Soyka says, "but they’d never been to the location." And that could mean odd results when it came time to hand-tint that picture.
The roof of the old Royal Hamilton Yacht Club on the Beach Strip, for instance. Soyka has seen postcards showing it to be green, red, black, blue and gray.
Cutting the grass at night
There was no liberty a postcard printer would not take with images. On request, they would turn a day shot into night, nearly always featuring a full moon. Soyka’s spotted one artificial night scene where they forgot to strip out the man mowing the lawn.
Tiny cars could appear on streets, no appreciation for scale at all. Planes could be made to fill the sky. And when the postcards were artists’ impressions, nothing was impossible. (Check International Harvester in the photo gallery above for an ambitious example of that.)
Hamilton was well served by the postcard. We were a prosperous and pretty town. There are postcard images galore to prove it — and not all of them were doctored.
You can see hundreds of them at Janet Forjan-Freedman’s superb site: hamiltonpostcards.com. And the Golden Horseshoe Post Card Club has a new website. On there you’ll see details for their annual postcard show, coming to the Dundas September 29.
And there is Crawford’s H+H show, which begins this Friday, opening day of Supercrawl, at 165 James North near Cannon. One bonus — the guy who’s never sent postcard himself is handing out free ones. Drop somebody a line and he provides the stamp.