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WEEK of September 19, 2005
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Senior Completes State Postcard Collection and Preserves a Family Legacy

by Jeffrey Stanley

From stamps to coins to bottles and bells or ceramic frogs, lots of people collect ephemera as a hobby. A quick search on the Internet turns up thousands of sites devoted to collecting one kind of item or another, many of which seem trivial to the dispassionate non-collector. BFS senior David Wheatley’s collection is anything but trivial. It has marked the renewal of a family tradition and carries a personal resonance to which any family can relate.

In her younger days, David Wheatley’s grandmother, Alice Churchill, had begun a state capitol postcard collection that she was never able to complete. “She had Alzheimer’s disease and wasn’t her real self for many of the years that David knew her,” explains David’s mother Carolyn. “She had a great love of history and was particularly interested in the oldest postcards in her collection, which must have been given to her by her mother or grandmother.”

David continues the story: “When I was in second or third grade, my mother started me off on a collection of my own.” It grew with the help of his aunt and cousins and their friends who heard about his collection and sent him postcards from all over the country. By 2005 David’s uniquely American collection grew to cover the capitol buildings of about 30 states.

When his grandmother passed away, David became even more determined to finish his collection. “I decided to write the governors’ offices of the states whose statehouses I didn’t have, asking them to send me a postcard.” He wrote about 20y letters by hand, enclosing a stamp and a dollar in each envelope.

The results were surprising, but not always stellar. Some generous politicians sent the postcard gratis, returning David’s stamp and dollar. Some sent postcards and kept the money and stamps. Some sent informational brochures on their states’ histories but no postcards. Some never responded at all.

Only then did David’s mother step in to hand down his grandmother’s postcards, allowing him to merge their collections. This windfall nearly completed the project. The only piece he lacked was that from the Lone Star State—a postcard of the capitol building in Austin, Texas.

Undaunted, Wheatley turned next to the Internet, winning an auction on eBay this summer for a Texas state capitol postcard. His multigenerational collection is now complete.

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