Will you be my Valentine?

I can remember Valentine's Day in grammar school. We would decorate paper lunch bags with hearts cut out of red construction paper and glue them to the outside of the bag. Then we would tape it to the side of our desk so classmates could drop in little valentines cards. It was always interesting to count how many you received (or didn't) by the end of the day. Valentine's Day, also known as Saint Valentine's Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, dates back to the 14th century. Saint Valentine was a clergyman and martyr in the Roman empire and his name has been associated with the valentine greeting card since the beginning. In the 18th century, people would embellish their handwritten valentine letters with painted pictures of hearts, cupids, arrows, birds and flowers. Some letters contained complicated puzzles or rebuses in which the words are given in clues of both pictures and parts of words. The letter would then be tucked inside an envelope, sealed with a wax stamp and would often be placed on a lady's doorstep. The Industrial Revolution took over the handmade valentines with mass production of cards in great varieties, colors and price ranges. The price of stamps has gone up, as have the cost of cards, but, even with this inflation, many people still find joy in sending sentiments of their love or friendship through a beautiful card. I read that the U.S. post office processes about 200 million valentine cards yearly! I have a friend, Dick Berggren, who is in his early 80s now. He grew up in Manchester, CT and is well known for his career as a motorsports announcer for NASCAR and pit reporter for ESPN and Fox networks. Dick even appeared as himself in the movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Dick is also the founder of the New England Racing Museum in Loudon, N.H. where my husband and I volunteer. I was looking through a pile of racing photo albums and at the very bottom was an old scrapbook. The F.W. Woolworth Co. price sticker on it for 39¢ caught my eye. I carefully opened the fragile and tattered brown paper pages to find a collection of old valentine cards. These cards had been sent to Dick when he was just a young boy in the late 1940s. There are endearing messages from his mother and grandmother handwritten on the cards—what a treasure! I asked Dick about the album, and he had no idea how it got to the museum other than it must have been on the bottom of a pile of racing books. Talking about it brought back his fond memories of his grandmother and sitting at the Woolworth's lunch counter with her eating lemon meringue pie. The graphics on the cards are so unlike what you might find today on valentines, but kittens and puppies seemed to be a popular subject matter to children back then and I believe still are today. The E. Rosen Company, in Providence, R.I. was a candy manufacturer which began marketing lollipop valentine cards in the 1950s. They took advantage of a sweet treat for Valentine's Day and designed a card with two slits that the stick of the lollipop would tuck into. Along with the sweet messages, some of the lollipop cards had more adult type content; "I'd like to be yours, I'll confess ~ I'm sure our hearts are in tune. Pop the question, and I'll say yes. Here's the pop ~ will the question come soon? When I searched for cards that might be similar to the ones in Dick's scrapbook, I found many vintage valentine cards and scrapbooks for sale. Not only valentine card scrapbooks, but cards of all kinds were put into these keepsake books in the 1940s and 1950s. The back of Dick's scrapbook also has birthday cards from the same era. I imagine it must have been a nice pastime to paste the cards into the book and a way not to waste a beautiful card that they had received from a loved one. The scrapbooks range in price based on content and condition. The individual 1940s-1950s die-cut valentines sell for less than a $1 to $15. Older, lacy cards can sell from $20 to $100. Many people use them as decorations around their home in February and up-cycle them into beautiful handcrafts. If you are interested in vintage valentine cards, there is a National Valentine Collectors Association. They have an active membership and both a website and Facebook page: http://www.valentinecollectors.com. Ruth Blais Thompson is a lifelong resident of the Monadnock Region, a Realtor for Blais & Assoc. Realtors in Keene and a volunteer CASA. Her pastimes are writing short stories, ancestry research and playing and writing music. She lives in Dublin with her husband and 2 cats and can be reached at rblaisthompson@gmail.com