HOW AN OBSESSION FOR COLLECTING CHICAGO POSTCARDS BEGAN.

I'm Neil Jan Gale the Director of the Chicago Postcard Museum. I was seven years old and dragged by my Aunt to a small suburban community art fair and collectible show. I remember the fair was outside on the sidewalks and also on a blocked street. While my Aunt went looking at stuff that a seven year old really didn’t care about, I was left at a dealers table full of shoe boxes of postcards.

I didn’t really know what to look for. I fixated on the postmark date and tried to find the oldest dated postcard from all those shoe boxes. After about an hour, my Aunt came back to the dealers table. “Did you find anything interesting?” she said. In my hand was a very old postcard. It had no picture and nothing to do with Chicago, but there it was. A postmark of June 4, 1885. I did it! 1885 was still old in 1967, right?

The dealer was a really old scruffy guy (from a seven year olds perspective) sitting on a tiny little stool in the only corner of shade in his booth area. He got up and came to the front of the booth. I handed him the postcard I picked out and reached in my pocket for my money. “That’ll be 25¢” he said. But before I could even move, my Aunt jumps in with “What’s the best you can do on the price? He’s only seven and is paying with his own money.” Now even at that age, I felt uncomfortable when the man look at me, then at the postcard, then at me again, and says “Well............... (there was an awkward 20 minutes of silence) O.K., how’s a dime sound.”

When I got home that day and looked at the postcard I bought, I realized that all I had to stare at was an old postmark. Nothing else on the postcard really got me excited. I thought to myself that the next time I see old postcards at shows I was going to look for pictures of Chicago since I live there and can relate to the pictures.

I never stopped collecting Chicago postcards from that day forward. Over 40 years collecting and I always ask the dealer “what’s the best you can do?” and wait for them to answer. The first one who speaks looses.