Dorsey W. Short - Postcard Publisher - by Alan Borer

If you collect postcards, even in a very limited way as I do, you are bound to encounter the abbreviation “RPPC.”  This stands for “Real Picture Post Card.”  During the height of the postcard craze, which I mentioned in the previous posting (no pun intended!), it was possible, even common, to have your camera image printed on post card-ready paper.  Other cards were printed locally, usually as a sideline for the local general store.  Some offered both kinds.

          Westerville had a resident who cashed in on the post card business.  Dorsey W. Short (1880-1946) ran a postcard printing shop on State Street.  The dates he operated the business are uncertain.  In 1910, he was listed as the running the business with his cousin, Lulu Clough, as the photographer.  His steps after 1910 are a tad sketchy, but of the postcard business we can be sure.  Although I have not conducted a formal census, most of the Westerville cards sold during the postcard craze were made and sold by Dorsey W. Short.

          Pictures of the Otterbein campus were common, as were the leafy streets of the village.   A typical card showed the Main Otterbein building, College Avenue, the old M. E. Church, and the School Building, looking about like it still does, all “Published by D. W. Short.” A printed mailer suggests that the finished product could be sent through the mails, and that Mr. Short had at least some out-of-town customers.

  But in addition to the middle class customers that bought his scenes of Westerville, Dorsey Short also had a line of postcards featuring “Pictures of Beautiful Women.” (Figure 3)  He offered thirty three designs and sold them 50c per hundred.  Short’s postcards were far from the “feelthy peectures” trope of later years.  But one wonders if this was a bid for a slightly different kind of clientele or gender.  The example shown here would never be described as “racy,” but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the schoolboys in town knew about them.

The postcards may have been a side line, as his real passion was automobiles.  Short was a regular user of classified ads in the Columbus Dispatch, buying and selling obscure motor cars.  His World War I draft card lists his occupation as “Ottomobiles [sic] and Trucks.”  By 1917 he was married to Marie, and listed a Columbus mailing address.  Dorsey Short and his wife Marie appear to have left Ohio by the 1920s and relocated to Volusia County, Florida.  There he operated a grocery store, and in the 1940s ran a nightclub.

Dorsey Short was a native of Pennsylvania, and if I researched it correctly, he died in Florida. He appears to have been a man who took advantage of trends like automobiles and picture postcards. Whether he made a good living or just squeaked by is unknown.

- Alan Borer