Stamm: My Postcard Connection to a 1908 Detroiter at 888 Porter Street

Travel with me to a century when social networkers used pens, paper and postage to exchange messages and make new friends.

In that era of the 20th Century B.C. (Before Computers), enterprising students and young adults used mail to turn distant strangers into contacts. Their version of a virtual world, a Second Life, came through pen pal connections.

That sort of armchair adventure appealed to Rose M. Geis, as you see from this card sent a week before Thanksgiving during the last century’s first decade. With a fountain pen’s neat strokes and capital letter flourishes, she wrote:

I saw your name to exchange postals. And I would like to correspondent with you.
Answer soon.

Her invitation, postmarked the morning of Nov. 21, 1908, went from Syracuse’s northwest side to Robert L. Stuart on the edge of downtown Detroit at 888 Porter St. (where the Lodge Freeway now carries commuters).

Back then, four years after Henry Ford opened a small Model T plant at Piquette and Beaubien, Detroit had about 465,000 residents,

Because Robert saved the three-by-five card and because he sought pen pals, presumably through a classified-style listing in a pulp magazine or other publication, he likely replied that fall to Rose’s three-sentence entreaty. Answer soon.

Whether they corresponded (or correspondented, as Rose would say) beyond two postcards can’t be known . . . but a novelist or screenwriter could weave that slim thread into an imaginative narrative that brings Rose to Detroit or Bob to Syracuse.

What’s not fiction is that I hold something each of them held 108 years ago, when a Census database shows Rose was 24. (No listing found for her recipient.) I admire the graceful curlicues on her signature and both addresses, the stylized logo of Rudolph Bros. Souvenir Postal Cards and the ornate Benjamin Franklin penny stamp issued in 1903. 

Mainly, I appreciate the flip side campus scene (below) from my alma mater — a view of the Carnegie Library at Syracuse University — that led me to pick up this memento at a flea market. Now I wonder how it wound up there, possibly after resting in a Stuart family closet, trunk or attic for many decades.

Sitting at my desk without a fountain pen, ink bottle or postcard stamp, I think about young Rose, young Robert and this form of one-to-one social media that left an artifact to be displayed in 2016 on a news site for readers with a similar interest in communicating . . . connecting . . . correspondenting.

How about you?

Did you have a pen pal? Travel back and share a memory below or at our Facebook page. Answer soon.

The postcard’s face shows the Carnegie Library at Syracuse University, where the writer graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of  Public Communications.