Curt Teich Company

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Curt Teich Company ,
Life Span: 1898-Present
Location: SE corner of Oakdale and Oakley avenues
Architect: TBD

Lakeside Business Directory of the City of Chicago, 1899

Teich Curt & Co.

Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, 1903
Teich Curt & Co. 3d fl. 117 Lake

Lakeside Business Directory of the City of Chicago, 1907
Teich Alfred post cards 7, 164 Randolph
Teich Curt & Co printers 174 Ohio

Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, 1911
Teich Curt & Co (Curt Teich) printers 125 W Ohio

Polk’s Chicago Numerical Street and Avenue Directory, 1928
Teich Curt & Co 1733-55 W Irving Park post cards

Inter Ocean, August 3, 1911

Manufacturing property at Oakdale and Oakley avenues, recently purchased by James R. Cardwell, president of the Cardwell Manufacturing company. has been sold to Curt Teich, who will improve it with a large factory for the manufacture of picture postal cards.

Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1911

Oakdale Avenue—Record was made of a transfer from Walter Ferguson of Stamford, Conn., to James R. Cardwell, president of the Cardwell Manufacturing company of the property at the southeast corner of Oakdale and Oakley avenues, 281×125 and 14×400 feet on Oakley, 141 feet south of Oakdale, for $20,000. Mr. Cardwell has conveyed the property to Curt, Telch & Co., manufacturers of postal cards, who will improve with an extensive plant.

Chicago Tribune, October 21, 1911

Factory Property Sold.
Curt Teich. manufacturer of postal cards, has purchased from the J. S. McDonald company the factory property in Irving Park boulevard, running from North Hermitage to East Ravenswood avenue. The lot fronts 250 feet on the boulevard, with a depth of 125 feet on the other two streets and is improved with a two story factory building. It will be remodeled and used by the purchaser for his business. He also may improve the 125 feet of vacant included in the sale. The consideration is withheld. but the sale was subject to a bond issue of $20,000, originally $25,000.

Paul C. Loeber & Co. represented the purchaser. while White & Tabor represented the McDonald company.

Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1974

If you take a vacation trip this year, you’ll probably send postcards home. Who makes those cards? How are the photos chosen? Do the manufacturers take your preferences into account?
Here’s Curt Teich Jr., Chicago postcard maker.
By Sue Sussman
They are in every backwater town, every city of every state or country. Hundreds of millions are bought, inscribed with “Having a wonderful time wish you were here” or some variation less shopworn, and mailed. Picture postcards, once an oddity, have become so much a part of our lives that we take them for granted.

But Curt Teich Jr. gives postcards a great deal of thought. His old loft building on West Irving Park Road is an unlikely castle for this prince of the posteard industry, but it is there that he turns out millions of cards a week.

“One BILLION, 646 MILLION and 70 cards were mailed in this country during the fiscal year ending June, 1972,” Teich says, handing a Government Postal Information Sheet across his no-frills desk. But there’s more. “I have spoken with five of the largest eard manufacturers in the United States, and we figure that 40 to 50 per cent of those bought are never mailed.” He sits back to let the impact of these figures sink in.

“They’re an impulse item,” he explains. “You don’t take a trip someplace planning to buy a postcard. But they’re wherever you go, and you buy them because they’re a nice way to show people where you are or where you’ve been.” The halls of his castle are surprisingly quiet.

Somewhere in the building machines are churning out more picture postcards than anywhere else in the world. Cards with “Curteichcolor 3-‘D’ Reproduction” running up the dividing line on the message side. Accordion-strip postcard folders. Postcard books with spiral bindings. “Bonus packs” with miniature views for the sender to keep, complete with a record of who got which card. Tour guides.

But the office area is silent, and there is an air of secrecy about the place. Nothing in the building’s downstairs directory or in the fifth-floor waiting room indicates the nature of business being conducted here. If Curt Teich plans to stock your drugstore with views of the Hancock building shot thru a Michigan Avenue manhole, he apparently doesn’t want anyone to know it in advance.

Teich’s office is surprisingly sterile. He has built his business on vibrant color and dazzling imagery, yet around him are no cards, no pictures, few decorations. But in his quiet way, he has cornered one of the world’s least thought-about and most lucrative markets.

“My father was a general printer.” Feich says. “Daily local newspapers and that kind of thing.” He nods at the sole plaque on the wali behind him: Curt Teich. 1898. “Back then, Americans considered postcards a fad item; no one considered them a self-supporting business. All the cards sold in the States were printed in Germany.

“My father was curious about them and went to Germany to learn how ‘stone’ printing was done. When he returned, he was able to make black-and-white lithograph cards, which his artists then colored in. In 1898 he took the plunge and gave up his general printing business for postcards.”

It was a virgin market then, and the senior Teich was able to undersell and outsupply his foreign competitors, Gradually he established himself as America’s foremost card manufacturer. Other printers began to turn out cards as sidelines, trying to get part of the action but retaining something to fall back on when the “fad” died out.

“After a while, there were a lot of peopletrying to get into this business,” Teich smiles. He got into it himself in 1928, following his studies in printing and journalism at the University of Heidelberg. He soon developed the first photographic color process for postcards, which improved their quality dramatically but increased production costs. Inasmuch as the eards were still expected to sell for a penny, volume sales became essential; and by 1932, when the postcard process was further upgraded by using linen paper, most of the smaller competitors had dropped from the scene.

Postcard prices began to go up: three for a nickel, then two for a nickel. “And during World War II,” Teich explains, “labor and material costs forced card prices up to a nickel apiece. To get people to pay such an exorbitant price for a card, we went into color printing from a color transparency. When you think about it,” —and he smiles again-“this is one of the few markets where the product actually improved when the prices went up.”

Clearly, Teich’s fascination is in the making of the card-the business of shooting, selecting, and selling. He has no collection of the cards he and his father have made, but he pushes a button on an antique intercom and asks for some to be brought in. An employe brings in an assortment of the very old, from an employe’s collection, and the very new.

“This,” Teich says, “is the new look.” He hands over a long, narrow 15-cent-card printed with an artist’s rendering of Sears Tower. “And you’ve seen a lot of these,” he says as he holds up a slightly smaller, deckle-edged view of the tower.

Even before the Sears building was completed, Teich’s cards featuring it had passed the 150,000 mark. Since its completion, Teich’s photographers have shot the building from almost every angle conceivable. He estimates that half a million Sears Tower cards have been sold-“and sales will keep going until someone else puts up a taller building somewhere,” he says. (Conversely, sales of Empire State Building postals-also included in his company’s repertoire-are slowing down.)

Teich’s “beat” extends to Japan, Australia, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean. “If there is a place people want to sec, we make a card of it.” Teich and his company watch for people’s acceptance of spots-Pike’s Peak and Old Faithful, for example-and use market research to learn what most people photograph al any given place. (“That way, we’re never off the mark.”)

“But it’s not always anything really unusual. A Washington tree at cherry-blossom time, the main street of a small town. As long as it’s something that says. ‘I was here,’ people will buy it,” he says.

His full-time photographers, trained to spot good card material, begin in the South in January and try to work their way up to Alaska for summer foliage and back thru Canada by the end of the year. “They may shoot a place in summer and make a note to return in the fall. Or a new building may go up on a certain street. Look at Chicago. Every time you turn around, a new building has changed the skyline-and that means a new postcard has to be made.” But there are few return shipments of obsolete cards, he says. Press runs and inventories are carefully (tho secretly) calculated, and the supply of an old card usually runs out by the time the updated one is ready.

Teich is not interested in seeing tourist slides for possible postcard photos. But people do come to him to order postcards for their restaurants, hotels, and other businesses. He has also had some memorable personal orders.

“A representative called us from the White House during President Nixon’s first or second year in office. The President wanted postcards made up from a family portrait. It was quite a large run-off,” Teich says, discrectly avoiding mention of exact numbers. The cards were mounted on the Nixons’ Christmas greetings.

Teich has, in fact, met the President socially on several occasions, but he is not the sort to drop what names he might. He seems much more at ease talking about his personal life.

“A large part of our business is abroad, so the missus and I travel a great deal,” he explains. The “missus’ is Kay Teich, a woman as bubbly and mischievous as her husband is quiet and reserved. She has, during their 40 years of marriage, managed to cause her husband some uncomfortable moments.

“I remember one time, in Singapore, we were dinner guests in the home of a business associate. Kay suddenly decided that nothing would do but some of those thousand-year-old eggs she had heard about. Well, our host rushed out and returned with these God-awful things, green outside, black inside, that smelled to high heaven. I decided, since I couldn’t offend my host, that the best way to eat the egg was to pop it whole into my mouth. I had a time forcing it down. Anyway,” he laughs. “Kay was watching me closely all the time; when 1 finally swallowed it, she asked me how 1 tiked it. I said it was delicious. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now you can have mine!'”

It is obvious that for Teich life has been, all in all. good. Like most self-employed men, he works harder than he should and travels more than he would like to. Now in his sixties, he is his own worst taskmaster, putting in 9- and 10-hour days when most men begin to think of retirement.

For 46 years he has worked to create and nurture a giant that started from a struggling young business. And the dream of new skyscrapers and old landmarks yet to be photographed is very much in evidence in the hidden-away old loft on the North Side.

During the 1930s a new color process was perfected by the Teich Company called the “C. T. Art Colortone.” In 1949 a process developed by Curt Teich, Jr. called “Curteichcolor,” was introduced. It was an exclusive four color process produced from a color transparency and plastic coated.

During World War II the Curt Teich Company received a commission from the Army Map Service. Over three million maps were printed by the company—100 percent of the invasion maps and half of all other maps used by the army.

In 1939 Curt Teich, Sr. stepped down as head of the company and management was taken over by his son Curt Teich, Jr., as president, and Frank Hochegger. Ralph Teich began working full-time for the company in 1949 in the photolitho department, but later moved to sales.

In 1974 the Teich family sold Curt Teich and Company. It then became Curt Teich Industries under the leadership of Norm Goldman. Regensteiner Publishing Enterprises, another Chicago printing firm, purchased the business in 1976 and continued producing postcards with the Curt Teich name until 1978. In 1980 the Curteichcolor process and name was purchased by the John Hinde company. The John Hinde Curteich, Inc. division of the company still operates out of Oxnard, California (as of 2010).

EVOLUTION OF THE POSTCARD

Pioneer Period: 1870-1898
The first government-produced postcard was issued on May 1, 1873.1 One side of the postcard was for a message and the other side was for the recipient’s address. By law, the government postcards were the only postcards allowed to bear the term “Postal Card.” Private publishers were still allowed to print postcards, but they were more expensive to mail than the government-produced cards (2¢ instead of 1¢).

Private Mailing Card Period: 1898-1901
On May 19, 1898, Congress passed an act allowing private printing companies to produce postcards with the statement “Private Mailing Card, Authorized by Act of Congress of May 19, 1898.” Private mailing cards now cost the same amount of money to mail as government-produced postcards: 1¢. The words “Private Mailing Card” distinguished privately printed cards from government printed cards. Messages were not allowed on the address side of the private mailing cards, as indicated by the words “This side is exclusively for the Address,”

Private Mailing Card Period: 1898-1901
In December 1901, the Postmaster-General issued Post Office Order No. 1447, which allowed the words “Post Card” instead of the longer “Private Mailing Card” on the back of postcards. Private printers were now also allowed to omit the line citing the 1898 Private Mailing Card Act. However, messages were still not allowed on the address side of postcards

Divided Back Period: 1907-1915
In 1907, a major change on the address side of postcards occurred. This change was prompted by the Universal Postal Congress, the legislative body of the Universal Postal Union. The convention decreed that postal cards produced by governments of member nations could have messages on the left half of the address side, effective October 1, 1907. The Universal Postal Congress also decreed that after March 1, 1907, government-produced cards in the United States could bear messages on the address side.2 Congress passed an act on March 1, 1907, in compliance with the Union’s decree, allowing privately produced postcards to bear messages on the left half of the card’s back.

White Border Period: 1915-1930
Throughout early postcard history, German printers dominated the market in postcard printing. However, with the beginning of World War I, American printers supplied most of the postcards in the United States. American printers did not have the same technology as German printers, so the quality of available postcards fell, and people lost interest in collecting them, effectively ending the “Golden Age” of postcards. Printers saved ink during this time by not printing to the edge of the card and leaving a white border around the image, giving the time period its name. Postcards from the White Border Period also had a description of the image on the message side, which retained the divided back.

Linen Period: 1930-1945
Beginning in the 1930s, new printing processes allowed printers to produce postcards with high rag content, which gave them a look of being printed on linen, rather than paper. The most notable printer of this period was Curt Teich & Co., which printed its first linen card in 1931, and whose postcards became popular around the world. Teich’s process allowed for quicker production and brighter dyes to be used to color the images. Most postcards retained the white border, though some were printed to the edge of the card. The back remained divided and usually contained printed information about the image. The production of linen postcards eventually gave way to photochrom (or photochrome)4 postcards, which first appeared in 1939. However, linen cards continued to be produced for over a decade after the advent of photochrom postcards.

Photochrom Period: 1945-Present
Modern photochrom-style postcards first appeared in 1939 when the Union Oil Company began to carry them in their western service stations. Production of the postcards slowed during World War II because of supply shortages, but after the war, they dominated the postcard market. The photochrom postcards are in color, and their images closely resemble photographs. Photochrom postcards are the ones most familiar to us today. In the 1990s the advent of e-cards and email started the decline of the postcard’s popularity. Today postcards are typically purchased as souvenirs, rather than a quick way to communicate.

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