Otterbein Student’s Postcard - by Alan Borer
From roughly 1896 to 1918, Americans purchased several billion (yes, that’s billion with a ‘b’) postcards, sending them, displaying them, and hoarding them. Even after the “postcard craze” ended, postcards remained a regular feature of vacations, family news, and advertising. Only in the age of the internet has postcard use dwindled.
My own interest in postcards is not so much for their pretty scenes, but for the messages written on the ‘back.” While rarely profound, they are the emails of a past age. And for every dozen cards that read, “having a wonderful time – wish you were here,” you can sometimes find messages that are quirky, oddball, or downright weird. Let’s take a look at one.
The card, used in 1924, is unsigned. Showing the Otterbein College “Main Building” (now Towers Hall) it was written and signed by a female student:
This is where I have most of my classes. I like College life very much at Otterbein…..Tell Prof. S [Charles Snavely?] that I am very much satisfied with Otterbein.
Typical postcard. But then:
I wrote you a long letter and lost it the other day and a woman found it. I called for it today and she said she said she burnt it because she thought I would not want it.
All that work for nothing![i]
We do not know who wrote the card. She did not sign it, except to leave her address: 107 Park Street. The card was addressed to Irma Ackley in Marion, Ohio. Here the story takes another twist, because Irma Ackley’s address in Marion was “White Oaks Farm.” And if you are imagining a bucolic scene with a barn and livestock, guess again.
White Oaks Farm was a sanitarium. Sanitaria (sanitariums) were the forerunner of hospitals, or more properly, long term health care facilities. Stroke patients, nervous disorders, rehabilitation, and all manner of conditions could be treated, along with room and board. According to the 1920 census, Miss Ackley was an employee of the sanitarium, not a patient. [ii] Her employer, though, had a reputation and that sanitarium had a reputation.
White Oaks was run by a homeopathic doctor named Charles E. Sawyer, the famous (or infamous) physician to president Warren G. Harding and his wife Florence. Sawyer, who owned several sanitariums in central Ohio, had befriended, and possibly cured, Mrs. Harding, who then took Sawyer to the White House. Sawyer became the President’s personal physician. When Harding died on August 2, 1923, Sawyer was blamed by some; homeopathy was (and is) disdained by some physicians. When Florence Harding died a year later, Sawyer refused to perform an autopsy, casting further suspicion on the whole affair. Sawyer himself died the same year.[iii]
History is often told in an ‘holistic” way. The idea that unconnected circumstances may yet find a connection if one looks hard. A perfect example case is our unnamed Otterbein student, whose postcard led us to the death room of a president. Which is another way of saying that s student of history should not ignore what looks like an insignificant detail.
Alan Borer
[i] The postcard is now in the collection of the Otterbein University Archives.
[ii] https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRXB-S8Q?i=8&cc=1488411&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AMDR9-Q8Q
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Sawyer
