Picture Postcards from Des Moines to Peru

In late December 1910, Joe Becker set out from Peru, Indiana, aboard the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, bound for Des Moines, Iowa, and a job with the Jewel Tea Company. Married earlier that year to young Marie Silberman, he would leave her behind for awhile for work in a faraway city. Within days of his arrival--maybe even on the day of his arrival--he began sending postcards back home. This was during the picture postcard craze of the early 1900s. The difference between Joe's cards and thousands of others flying through the mail every day is that his were hand-drawn and hand-colored. Joe Becker himself was the artist, and his postcards offer a charming view of life in 1910 and 1911. They also give us an idea of the love and devotion Joe Becker felt for his young wife.

Joseph H. Becker was born in 1881 in Indiana. On April 11, 1910 (her obituary says 1911), he married Marie I. Silberman, who, in January, had reached age twenty-one. The newlyweds enjoyed their first eight months together. By Christmas they had a home at 85 East Eighth Street in Peru, a squarish wooden frame house, painted green, with a swing on the porch and a dog in the yard. On Christmas evening, the Beckers held a party at their house. Joe played the fiddle and called the dance while Marie looked on from beside the Christmas tree. Gertrude and Mary shared a place at the upright piano, and Papa danced with Mrs. Mulcahy. Rose, dressed in Christmas colors, had Jess as her partner. Helen and Fred danced together, too, but Mayme and Graham were the ones who really kicked up their heels.

Sometime between Christmas and December 29, Joe got on the train to Des Moines. For the next couple of months, he batched it in an Iowa rooming house, faithfully sending back to Marie his postcards, sometimes two in one day. I have twenty-three of them in all, but there must have been more. The first is from December 29, the last from April 1. The first four cards are quick sketches in ink that has become sepia-toned with age. The card from January 3 is the first in color. Joe let his beard get a little scruffy in Des Moines. His home habits might have suffered a little, too. One highlight of his time away was a trip to the Palace Skating Rink, one that ended in "tradegy" when he fell from his wheeled feet.

I don't know when Joe Becker returned to Peru and to his Marie. As their first anniversary approached, Joe drew the last of the cards I have in my possession. The card is not postmarked but instead dated April 1--April Fool's Day. Joe and Marie lived most of their lives in their hometown of Peru, where they reared two sons and a daughter. The postcards I have presumably came down through their daughter, thence presumably to her own children or grandchildren, thence to a fellow parishioner. After she passed away, they went to her husband, a longtime photographer in Peru. From him they came into our family.

Joe Becker the artist died in 1945. Marie Becker, the recipient of those long-ago postcards, followed him to the grave in 1964. Both are buried in St. Charles Catholic Cemetery in Peru.

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Clare Angell in Picture Postcard Monthly Magazine

Ken Dickinson and I recently collaborated on an article on the artist Clare Angell for Picture Postcard Monthly magazine. The article was published in the November 2013 issue and showcases some of Angell's art in full color. All the images are from Ken's collection. Picture Postcard Monthly is a British magazine. Their website is:

http://www.postcardcollecting.co.uk/

Clare Angell had only a tenuous connection to Indiana. In her book, Art and Artists of Indiana (1921), Mary Q. Burnet listed Angell as having been born in Goshen, Indiana. Public records tell a different story. If those records are accurate, then Angell was born on March 4, 1874, in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Eugene Angell (1848-1907) was also a native of Michigan. Clare Angell's mother, Mary Butterfield Angell (ca. 1853-?), was born in Indiana, probably in Goshen. In 1880 she was with her husband in Lansing. Eugene Angell, a banker and investor, became insolvent in 1883. Presumably he and his wife separated after that. The records of the 1890 census have of course been lost. They may very well have showed Clare Angell with his mother in Goshen, where she was enumerated in the 1900 census with her family. By then Clare Angell was on his own as an artist and probably living in New York City.

Clare Angell worked as a postcard artist and illustrator for about thirty years. Unfortunately, there aren't any records of him after the 1920s. If anyone knows anything more on Clare Eugene Angell, Ken Dickinson and I would very much like to hear from you.

The First World War began one hundred years ago this year. This postcard by Clare Angell will not be the last image you see in 2014 from that long-ago conflict.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

All images are from the collection of Ken Dickinson.

Leota Woy (1867-1962)

Leota Woy was born on July 3, 1867, in New Castle, Indiana, and was in Colorado by 1888, where she attended the University of Colorado. In 1920 she moved to Los Angeles. Leota Woy seems to have devoted herself to the design of bookplates, postcards, and crests. I don't know of any other illustration credits for her, although she also worked in stained glass, embroidery, and needlework. She was a member of art clubs in Denver and southern California. Leota Woy died on January 23, 1962, in Glendale, California, at age ninety-four.

Leota Woy was most well known for her bookplates. This one was for the actor John Gilbert.

Here is a bookplate for Walter Sigfrid Olson. Note the vertical signature on the lower right.

During the picture postcard craze of the early 1900s, Leota Woy was a postcard designer. Her frog series from about 1910 was very popular.

Leota signed some of her designs with her initials encircling her copyright notice.

Leota also created a popular Valentine series of cards. This may have been one of the cards in that series.

This looks like a card from the same series.

Leota's design for a card of the Colorado columbine and the Denver Auditorium Building shows a completely different approach. 

Merry Christmas from

Indiana Illustrators & Hoosier Cartoonists!

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916)

The Riley Festival takes place this weekend, October 4-7, 2012, in Greenfield, Indiana. The four-day festival commemorates the life and work of "The Hoosier Poet," James Whitcomb Riley. Born on October 7, 1849, in Greenfield, Riley was at one time among the most popular and beloved of American poets. In addition to being a poet, Riley was a newspaper columnist, a public speaker, and--in his younger and leaner days--a sign painter and house painter. He is supposed to have painted the old house across the street from my family's own home.

Riley authored scores of poems which were collected in more than three dozen books. Among his most famous poems are "The Old Swimmin'-Hole," "Little Orphant Annie," and "The Raggedy Man." The last two titles inspired two younger men--Hoosiers both--in their own works. Harold Gray created "Little Orphan Annie," a comic strip that ran in newspapers for nearly ninety years. Johnny Gruelle and his family were behind Raggedy Ann, the little rag doll so well loved by American children, and drew her name from those two poems. The poem "Little Orphant Annie" is memorable for its refrain

An' the Gobble-uns'll git you

  Ef you

    Don't

      Watch

        Out!

Riley was an artist himself, but he left the illustration of his books to those more accomplished than he. They included Howard Chandler Christy, Ethel Franklin Betts, E.W. Kemble, and A.B. Frost. Perhaps no other illustrator is more closely identified with Riley's work than Will Vawter (1871-1941). Though twenty-two years separated them, Riley and Vawter were friends, based in part on their shared memories of childhood in small-town Indiana. Born in Virginia, Vawter grew up in Greenfield, Riley's home town. In 1899, Riley wrote to Vawter: "Simply you are divinely ordained to succeed. And now as I forecast you must prove it." With that, Vawter became Riley's handpicked illustrator.

Other Indiana illustrators who contributed to Riley's books included Virginia Keep Clark (1878-1962), William F. Heitman (1878-1945), and two artists of the Hoosier Group, Richard Buckner Gruelle (1851-1914) and T.C. Steele (1847-1926). (R.B. Gruelle was Johnny Gruelle's father and a friend of Riley. The two men lived close by each other in Indianapolis and Riley was a frequent visitor in the Gruelle home.) Mary Catherine McDonald (1852-1897), about whom little is known, was another Riley illustrator. Riley was also a mentor and benefactor to younger authors, including poet and illustrator Evaleen Stein (1863-1923) of Lafayette, Indiana. Among the more accomplished of Riley's illustrators was Franklin Booth (1874-1948). His full-color drawings for Riley's fantasy poem-play, The Flying Islands of the Night (1913), are simply breathtaking. Booth's interest in and knowledge of architecture are on full display in these drawings. His trademark trees, clouds, and floating and flying objects can be found in almost every image. You can see all of Booth's illustrations on a blog called "Golden Age Comic Book Stories," here.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913), an adopted Hoosier, an author, and an artist himself, defined reading as:

The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang. (From The Devil's Dictionary.)

If you substitute "poems" for "short stories" (thereby throwing Riley into the mix) and recognize that George Ade was the leading author of "humor in slang," you'll see that Indiana authors were a dominant force in American literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James Whitcomb Riley played his part in that. If he isn't well known anywhere else today, he is remembered at least in his hometown this weekend.

James Whitcomb Riley, "The Hoosier Poet," commemorated in a U.S. postage stamp in 1940.

And on a cigar box lid, on which he is called the "Hoosier Bard."

As a young man, Riley worked as a sign painter and house painter. Here is an advertisement in his own hand from 1871.

Riley was no mean artist, as this advertisement for McGrillus' Blood Tonic demonstrates. The image is from 1872 and was part of an exhibition at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, in 2011. You can read more on the website of Indiana Public Media, here.

Will Vawter was Riley's hand-picked illustrator. This image is from Farm Rhymes (1903).

In my list of Indiana artists who illustrated Riley's poems, I shouldn't forget Cobb Shinn (1887-1951) of Fillmore and Indianapolis. During the postcard craze of the early 1900s, Shinn created hundreds of designs, including this one and the one below for a series entitled "Riley Roses."

Franklin Booth illustrated Riley's book The Flying Islands of the Night from 1913. The book was published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis.

The Flying Islands of the Night was a rare chance for Booth to work in color. The results compare favorably with the work of any American illustrator of his day. Like Riley, Booth was the son of a hard-nosed military veteran with little understanding of his interest in the arts. Both men got a comparatively late start in life and worked for newspapers before finally meeting with success. Interestingly, neither ever married.

Text copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley