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| Curt Teich's citizenship papers. |
Immigrants are often hidden. Living in neighborhoods you don't visit, doing unheralded jobs. A pint of strawberries lists the origin of the fruit but not of who picked it. Your hospital bill lists every procedure but ignores where the medical staff tending to you came from. We will never really know how vital immigrants are to our country until the incoming administration starts plucking them off the street and deporting them. Assuming Donald Trump does what he promises, always an iffy proposition.
This is nothing new. If you look at old postcards in a thrift store, nothing says, "Made by German immigrants in Chicago." Beautifully bound books don't credit, "Sewn by Bohemians."
Which was a big problem for Jill Gage, custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry Library — her title, in the vernacular, means the person who wrangles the library's extensive collection of posters, handbills, catalogs, books, typefaces and other printed material, which includes bus tickets and sheet music.
When she set out to curate the latest exhibition at the Newberry, "Making an Impression: Immigrant Printing in Chicago," she started by looking at what the Newberry doesn't have.
"I wanted to think about what we don't see in the collection so much," she told me, when we met to walk through the small but significant show at the library's Hanson Gallery. "I wanted to poke at the collection and think about printing from a different angle."
Some people might know Chicago is the former printing capital of the nation, between R.R. Donnelley churning out Yellow Pages and Rand McNally making maps. But there was also Curt Teich, who came from Germany for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and noticed a need for postcards.
"If you had to think about the most important printer in the history of Chicago, I would say Curt Teich," Gage said. "He really brought the postcard industry to the U.S. It really opened up this huge part of American culture."
The Newberry has 3 million postcards, and the Teich collection includes fascinating production material, plus the family archive, including their all-important citizenship papers. Finding Teich was easy; other contributors to Chicago printing, not so much.
"They're hidden," she said. "I wanted to think about what you can't see. I'm obsessed by what I call 'invisible labor.'"
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The reason the printing business is gone from here is that the printer's union went insane with demands in the 1960s & 70s. Donnelly moved its business to Tennessee & all but one of its lakefront buildings along the IC Mainline are gone. I.S. Berlin's huge modern building at Kimball & Belmont was demolished after they left the city & Curt Teich moved to Ireland in the 1980s, due to amazing tax incentives from the Irish government. The union leadership essentially lost their minds & thought the gravy train would last forever & the membership foolishly allowed them to do it.
ReplyDeleteSo, what happened after the companies deserted the U.S. and the unions dwindled away? All that "gravy" went to the execs and the coupon clippers.
Deletejohn
My first real job right out of college in 1982 was for a small company in the hot new field of computerized phototypesetting, located somewhat ironically on an upper floor of the Gunthorp-Warren Printing Company building, which used to stand at 123 North Wacker Drive. I would write the necessary Fortran code to read a customer's magnetic tape, push it through a Digital PDP-11 computer and out to a Compugraphic phototypesetter, which painted the type directly onto photosensitive paper. I carried its hefty light-tight output cartridge to a developing machine, and minutes later the fully finished printing masters emerged. Just me.
DeleteOh, I knew full well that what I was doing took the place of countless others who had previously done that by hand, in some cases laboriously so. Our office by comparison employed fewer than 10 people and was mostly quiet, save for the bizarre farting noise caused by the Compugraphic as its vacuum system loaded paper without actually touching it. The Gunthorp-Warren building was by then in its last years of existence, without the heavy machinery for which its massive floors were originally built, and its support staff was down to a few, most notably keeping an operator on duty for one of the last buildings in the city with a manually-operated elevator, a uniformed attendant always sitting inside during business hours.
Inevitably, the building was sold; the high-rise there now took its place. Our company was acquired by a bigger one, with a chain of mergers to follow. When we first got the news that big changes were coming, our president commented, a little ruefully, "These floors were built to hold printing presses. They're going to have a real fight to get this down." It actually didn't take that long, and now it's all gone.
Blaming workers for plant relocations irks me. The details of 1960-1970 Union printers' wages are unknown to me but I know telephone books and mail order catalogs are basically extinct. Sears, Montgomery Ward and Bell telepone have gone away. Postcards is the not the business it used to be.
DeleteWhat the reason for all of the non-Union manufacturing leaving Chicago?
Another thing that irks me; when a developer or builder says that he built something with no mention of the workers who poured the foundation, framed the lumber, laid the bricks, pulled the wire, plumbed the pipes, et cetera.
Looks like a typo at the end of the 4th paragraph.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jack. Not a typo, per se, but notes mode instructions to the copy desk. What happens is , the people responsible for the print edition grab the text, move it, and the italics fall out, so I include instructions, in notes mode that don't appear in print, reminding them to make a certain word, say, italics. Then when I grab the copy. to put on the blog, the instructions go into print, and sometimes I forget to snip them out. A lot of ways to screw this stuff up. Fixed now.
DeleteThe kind of people that would endure the hardships of moving to a different country is also the kind that would be brave, scrappy, enterprising, and hard working enough to excel at their jobs, create innovations, and launch businesses, not to mention contribute to the bouquet of cultures we're lucky to have in this country.
ReplyDeleteI think even Republicans understand that immigrants are a large part of the work force and consumer base. I think they want to use xenophobia for political gains, but would never really do anything more than symbolic cruelty, which is horrible enough, but I don't think they'll go through with camps and mass deportations.
Black citizens in the deep south loved mail-order catalogs. They could buy what they wanted at fair prices instead of dealing with the high prices and limited selection at their local stores. One of Chicago's early retail giants--Roebuck, Sears, I can't remember--made it clear in promotional materials that sales were open to all, including Black customers. No surprise that White Southerners tried their best to restrict catalog access and product delivery.
ReplyDeleteShow me a person who is against immigrants and I will show you a closed minded racist.
ReplyDeleteNot exactly on topic, but want to mention not an immigrant, but perhaps "emigrant" would fit. In my 20 years or so of obsessively reading the daily obituaries, I have never noticed an obituary like today's for Richard Parsons, which was credited in part to Anick Jesdanun, who apparently predeceased Mr. Parsons in 2020. It must happen a lot, given that the obituaries for famous people are at least partially prepared long before the famous ones actually die, but I hadn't seen it before.
ReplyDeletejohn
"A historical exhibition should connect to life today, and not just be some random aspect of the past dredged up and presented for no particular purpose." Yikes.
ReplyDeleteThe three million postcards at the Newberry Library were gifted to them by the folks who had originally received them from the estate of Curt Teich. His story is both interesting and amazing. In the early 1900s, a postcard craze swept the country. It had begun in Germany, where most postcards were printed and then shipped across the pond. Curt Teich, a German immigrant in Chicago, saw an enormous need that could be filled in America, instead of in Europe.
ReplyDeleteHe boarded a train from Chicago to St. Petersburg, FL. From there, he traveled by rail to the West Coast. At each stop along the way, camera in hand, he photographed the businesses populating numerous small towns, and views of their’ Main Streets.
Those images became his first large print run of illustrated postcards. At the low price of one dollar per one thousand cards, Teich solicited an astounding $30,000 worth of orders during his cross-country journey. Do the math. He returned to Chicago with orders for printing a staggering number of postcards...THIRTY MILLION of them. And he did just that.
The first American postcard companies printed their materials abroad, mostly in Germany, but Curt Teich wanted to print his own postcards, and he built his own enormous plant on Chicago's North Side, and eventually became one of the most prolific postcard printers in America during the first half of the last century. His company invented those ubiquitous "Greetings From..." color postcards, and eventually printied up to 250 million cards annually.
Between '86 and '90 I lived near the massive old Curt Teich printing plant, at Irving Park and Ravenswood, right about the time the massive complex was being converted to residential housing. It's now a national landmark, and encompasses several city blocks. At one point, it was one of the largest printing facilities in the city, if not the country..