If you’ve seen enough old-time postcards, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve run across the name Curt Teich (pronounced “tike”) on them. I doubt if you ever read his name at the end of a card’s message, as in “Lovely weather so far. Seen lots of sights. Wish you were here. Curt Teich.”
Yet Teich is a name associated with the most postcard views ever published in the United States. The Curt Teich Company even published some Brookfield views.
Talk about a rags-to-riches success story. Teich, born in 1877, came to the United States from Germany in 1895, allowed entry into the country by way of family members here who sponsored him. He came to Chicago and immediately went to work in the printing business, beginning as an apprentice. In 1898 he started his own printing business, and by 1900 he was printing view and advertising postcards.
Five years later, Teich had his grand idea, inspired by the growing postcard collecting craze. He took a train from Chicago bound for the west coast and, wherever the train stopped, he got off and looked for local places of pictorial interest.
Then he set up his camera, took some images and convinced local merchants to sell these views at their shops. He insisted on a minimum order of 1,000 cards, at $1 per thousand. Though some dispute the figures, this first 90-day trip reportedly brought in $30,000 worth of postcard orders. That’s 30 million cards. The shopkeepers then sold each postcard for a penny. After the first 100 of the 1,000 were sold, the other 900 represented pure profit.
Teich hired photographers to do exactly what he’d done, scouring the country,
obtaining orders. His strategy was simple: To turn a profit, print postcards of anything for anybody. As a result, the Teich Company became the largest volume printer of postcards in the United States.
The Golden Age of Postcard Collecting lasted from about 1905 to 1915, when cards cost just a penny to buy and a penny to mail. When the post office doubled the price to mail a card to two cents, that struck the first blow. Colorful holiday and greeting postcards were being produced in Germany up to this time, and the advent of World War I cut off this source of supply to collectors, who used to leave postcard albums in their parlors for visitors to page through. But Teich had not relied on Germany or greeting cards, so he stayed open for business. He had found his niche, “linen texture” view cards, and stuck with it.
Despite the practice of sending out photographers all over the country, the Teich Company apparently failed to discover the existence of Brookfield until 1935. When the Brookfield Zoo opened in 1934, the company began making colored views of Brookfield, or at least the zoo.
It wasn’t as if, up to this year, that Brookfield had been ignored by postcard companies altogether. Paul R. Vogel and Company produced possibly the first photo postcard ever made of the Brookfield Train Station, sometime after 1907. Around 1910, and for a short period afterward, “ZIM” sold at least seven views, appearing to favor the area of Congress Park. The C.R. Childs Company of Chicago took at least four good photo views along Salt Creek on August 6, 1913. As late as 1937 they had produced a tinted view of the “British Old People’s Home, Hollywood, Illinois.” Also from 1912-13, P.L. Huckins of Chicago was known to be producing photo cards of the village.
When Brookfield became known as Brookfield in 1905, Teich was just starting up his postcard empire. And taking into account his minimum 1,000 card-per-view orders, maybe the fact that Brookfield’s population went only from 1,111 in 1900 to 2,186 in 1910, led him to conclude that enough people wouldn’t buy the cards from the shopkeepers.
Or maybe the shopkeepers thought that the cards of Vogel, ZIM, Childs and Huckins had covered the village pretty well already. Adding to this was the fact that ordinary people could buy postcard-sized box cameras and make their own views on postcard paper stock. Anyway, Teich finally approved of the zoo as a subject from 1935 onwards. By this time, Teich was printing a minimum of 6,500 view cards per order.
The first two cards were produced for sale in 1935″of the south entrance to the Zoo and the polar bear “pit””with 25,000 of each ordered and delivered. Once again, a single penny stamp would cover mailing each one.
They sold slowly. These two cards have been known to bear postmark dates up to the year 1940. In 1938, 100,000 cards were printed of the zoo’s great attraction, the Giant Panda Su-Lin, on display since February 1937.
Other printing companies were not slow to capitalize on the popularity of the zoo. The American Colortype Company of Chicago was issuing linen-type cards as of 1940. The Tichnor Brothers of Boston also issued linen cards in the late 1940s. The Grogan Photo Company of downstate Danville produced several black-and-white photo cards during these years. The H.S. Crocker Company of San Francisco printed several thousand color photo postcards of the Children’s Zoo which opened in 1953, and was still printing Zoo cards through the 1980s.
Through its final days in 1974, the Curt Teich Company issued 68 different views of the zoo, of which only seven were reprints, done in 1973.
Teich also printed postcards of local sites outside of the zoo, beginning with a “Greetings from Brookfield Illinois” card made in 1950. The letters of the word “Brookfield” were hollowed out, and inside of them, thin pictures of places around the village were shown, ranging from the zoo to the library, churches and two schools, Gross, and the Riverside-Brookfield High School. Some 12,500 postcards showing the front of RB were issued the next year, in 1951.
Other non-zoo Teich cards were of the Willow Farm Dairy milk vending machine (1955), and the Prairie Avenue home of the Seventh Day Adventists (1955). Possibly in existence are two other cards depicting a “wooden bridge over a stream” (1960), and a service station bearing the legend “Join Us for Friendly Service” (1974).
In the late 1950s, Teich began to phase out the production of linen-texture cards in favor of slick, shiny-surfaced ones, of the type still around today. Even now, postcards are still being sold at the zoo, although they have not been of the Curt Teich brand for many years.
The Teich postcard business was sold in 1974 to the Regensteiner Publishing Company. For few years afterward, postcards were still being issued by the R.P.C. with the Teich name on them. In 1982, the R.P.C. donated the entire collection of 365,000 postcards and the archives of the Teich Company to the Lake County Museum in north suburban Wauconda.
The last, most recent postcard of Brookfield was issued in 1980, but not by Regensteiner. It showed the Brookfield Village Hall to the west, and the Bicentennial Bell and pavilion to the east. Commissioned by Mylon Fisher of Fisher’s Pharmacy, the card was printed by the H.S. Crocker Company, now of San Bruno, Calif., and was sold at the drug store for a few decades afterwards.
Here in the United States, postcards are still being produced and are primarily of the “wish you were here” type of vacation views. However, they no longer cost a penny to buy, but cost anywhere up to a dollar. Taking into account the added postage, they’re not the cheap means of communication that they once were.
It is so much easier to whip out the digital camera and take a dozen shots of a scene, then choose the best of them, and zip
one off to a dozen friends at once, now
saying in effect, “wish you were here”this very minute.”
Or maybe a picture cellphone could be beeped into life, with the image sent, accompanied by instant descriptive dialogue. If the Curt Teich Company were still in business, and it had not been sold when the founder died in 1974, probably the technology of today would’ve nudged the company to throw in the towel and call it quits.
Thanks to Teich’s massive production of cards, those of the zoo type can still be found and acquired fairly cheaply. A single dollar or so can still buy one at antique and second hand shops or from postcard collectors, such as those belonging to the Windy City Postcard Club, which meets at 7:30 p.m. on the third Wednesday of every month, at the Sokol Hall, 3909 Prairie Ave., in Brookfield.
Further information on the many cards produced by the Curt Teich Company can be obtained by phoning the Lake County Museum’s Curt Teich Archives at (847) 968-3381, or by e-mailing the museum at teicharchives@co.lake.il.us.