|
|
Photo Sue Harrison
Dan Towler goes through one of the boxes of postcards from his collection as he gets ready for a slide show and talk. |
|
|
Banner file photos
Upper postcard: Two young women stroll along Commercial Street in the black-and-white and colorized views of the exterior of the Advocate building.
Lower postcard: Kendall Lane was picturesque enough to inspire many postcards. Towler’s grandmother’s house is the second from the front on the right. |
|
‘Wish you were here…’
Towler’s postcard collection tracks the history of Provincetown
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Who hasn’t grabbed a colorful postcard off the rack and sent a hastily scribbled message to the folks back home? And who would guess that that very personal missive might someday wind up as part of some stranger’s collection?
For hundreds of visitors to Provincetown from the turn of the last century through the ’60s, that’s exactly what happened — their thoughts have become part of Dan Towler’s extensive postcard collection. Towler, who’s done more than his share of traveling, may not have sent too many postcards of his own during his footloose days, but he’s made up for that with the ones he’s collected. He will give a slide show and lecture based on his postcard collection at 8 p.m. on Saturday at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown. Admission is free.
In Provincetown, the postcard gained prominence as the fishing industry waned in the wake of the Portland Gale of 1898 and tourism started to climb. With the tourists came the need for postcards, many of which advertised hotels and boarding houses.
Historic events like the groundbreaking and later dedication of the Pilgrim Monument that brought two presidents to town generated a flurry of cards. And, of course, scenic shots of the town, the shore and the popular town criers were all memorialized on postcards first in black-and-white, then hand-colored and finally in the vibrant Kodak colors of the mid-1900s. Many postcards were generated locally, and in Provincetown the Advocate newspaper became the postcard maker and seller, listing the new postcards arriving each week. The old Advocate building across from Town Hall on Commercial Street was filled with postcards, souvenir plates and other items a visitor could buy to commemorate a fun time.
Towler, the collector of those memories, has lived in Provincetown for nearly 20 years and claims ties back to his earliest childhood. His grandmother, Harriet Adams, was a dynamic woman who moved to the Cape with three daughters back in the late ’20s. She married the son of the local pharmacist at Adams Pharmacy and over the years opened a combination restaurant and general store, ran one of the most successful real estate offices in town and wrote a column for the Cape Cod Times. Her three daughters, including Towler’s mother, grew up and went to school in Provincetown.
Later, grown and married, she brought her three sons, Bill, Dan and Silas John, back for summers.
“My brothers and I always loved coming here,” Towler says. “My grandparents were cool and our parents were in vacation mode and it was do what you want. The shoes came off and we were up and down the street and in and out of the dunes.”
His own childhood didn’t remain so bucolic. His parents’ marriage fell apart and his mother committed suicide when he was 19. He went on the road, traveling from coast to coast and north to south. At 22 he came back to Provincetown to think about his life. He lived illegally in a tent in the Seashore and worked odd jobs.
“I was too mixed up and restless to stay anywhere very long,” he says of that time. “I had been out west and had the travel bug. I hitchhiked the 400 miles of the Appalachian Trail.”
He went north to Vermont and south to Florida where he lost his tent from the dunes after he hitched a ride with a teenage couple on the lam from Indiana who took off in the middle of the night with all his things.
In his travels he fathered a son who now lives in Georgia. He found he wanted to spend more time with his son and wanted to change his life.
“There was a turning point,” he says. “At 36, I felt I had pissed away a lot of my good years drinking too much, having too many relationships, and I came [to Provincetown] for some retrospection. I never dreamed I’d be here this long.”
He settled into one of the few places that he’s been able to call home and eventually wound up with a year-round job at the Fine Arts Work Center. He found that once he had roots he got interested in history. He became a self-taught Provincetown historian and began to amass his large postcard collection.
Towler reveals that there is a whole subculture dedicated to the postcard, including the Cape Cod Postcard Club, which meets in Dennis. People look for a specific card the way stamp collectors seek the rare stamp. There are meetings and expos where trading is wild as collectors look to fill in gaps. Most collectors specialize in some area or type of card.
He got a grant to have part of his collection put on slides and began doing talks after seeing a slide show by the late Clive Driver.
“I was in heaven,” he says. “That was my inspiration.”
Towler has around 1,000 cards and almost 800 of them are on slides. His talks, he says, are governed by showing a manageable number of cards. A slide carousel holds 80 and he usually comes with two carousels.
He also finds the notes on the back have their own appeal. Having text or having been mailed doesn’t reduce the value of the cards, he says.
They are easy to collect, not expensive to get started with and easy to store — all elements that make them a popular choice for collectors.
But like so many things, the ubiquitous postcard is fading from popularity.
“They were a natural,” Towler says of their almost instant popularity with the public. “Even 100 years ago when they were mailed they got there in two days. People wrote these pithy messages. Now with the era of instant communication, with cell phones and e-mail, who sends postcards anymore?”
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
|
In the Arts
|
|
|
|
|
Feb 16th, 2006