Florida: the Silver River in the early 1900s. Home of glass bottom boats, crystal clear waters, and an affinity for mermaid culture.

CLIP: Eating underwater? And a thirst too.

For these reasons and others that we'll learn about in this film, before this guy took over, this was the most popular tourist destination in the state.

And how people found out about this place?

CLIP: Thousands of visitors every day in Florida's Silver Springs.

It was postcards, picture postcards. That was one way.

For instance, on the back of a view card that touts the park as an underwater fairyland, postmark 1955, Grace writes, "We are now on our way home. It was a very wonderful trip."

On another card, an aerial view of the park grounds. Vera refers to the printed reading matter on the back when she writes, "Just returned from an enjoyable trip to the above. Really an attraction. I hope you all can see it sometime."

Another card, this one postmarked 1940, shows boaters feeding a school of fish. And on this one, Anna writes, "We went over the lake in one of the glass bottom boats, and it sure was a wonderful experience. Lovely underwater gardens. Love to all."

For the proprietors of the park, whom we'll meet shortly, postcards help spread word about their business and increase foot traffic. For everyday folks who wrote on these postcards and sent them through the mail, they were a relatively quick and inexpensive way to connect with their recipients.

We'll be looking at not only what these postcards show and what they say, but also how they were produced. In that way, we'll be taking up Carolyn Miller's invitation to investigate processes of genre emergence and evolution through an empirical case-based approach that is sensitive to the conditions of the moment, which are generally more complex than they seem.

Now, production of all the cards you will see in this film took place in this factory by Curt Tecih and Company of Chicago, whose owner and namesake wrote in the American Stationer:

Every one of our representatives is a practical postcard man knowing the manufacturing process. We employ the best artists and mechanics and have arrangements with the best photographers all over the country to supply us with the best photographs which can be made. It has taken us many years and an outlay of a great deal of money and energy to build up our organization, but our efforts have been fully repaid by the enormous volume of business we receive both for new and reprint work.

Speaking of volume, Teich and Company produced dozens of views of Silver Springs from the 1920s to the 60s. Most of these were commissioned by park owners Carl Ray and William Shorty Davidson. Ray and Davidson were tireless promoters of their park's many offerings, and they frequently leveraged the spring's crystal clear waters, as dramatized in this assortment of postcard views of underwater activities usually reserved for land mammals.

Ray and Davidson frequently used the work of photographer Bruce Mozert, most famous for his pioneering underwater techniques, but he captured many of the images on which cards of a more terrestrial variety were based as well.

Indeed, there was plenty to do in the open air at Silver Springs, and these activities tended to fall under certain headings. Headings that persisted across media forms such as brochures and films, even those that were produced after Ray and Davidson sold the park to Paramount ABC in the early 60s.

To get a sense of how this played out, oh wow, how they do that? Anyway, we're going to watch this quick promotional film.

CLIP: This fabulous Central Florida resort on State Highway 40, Florida's Silver Springs. It's an exciting adventure filled with unusual and colorful subjects for visitors' cameras. Tommy Bartlett's International Deer Ranch on the spacious grounds of the springs features 150 tame animals from 18 foreign countries. The exciting Jungle Cruise Speedboat Ride is a 5mile trip along the Silver River through dense jungle growth and beautifully landscaped banks. The famous glass bottom boats of Florida Silver Springs move up and down the Silver River, circling the giant springs and giving thousands of visitors the thrill of a lifetime as they look into the crystal clearar depths beneath them. And when you've seen all these things at Florida's Silver Springs, there's still the bathing beach to be visited for a refreshing dip in the wonderfully clear water.

All right, let's watch parts of that again. This time with a little help from our friends in Chicago.

CLIP: at Florida Silver Springs. It's an exciting adventure filled with unusual and colorful subjects for visitors cameras. Tommy Bartlett's International Deer Ranch on the spacious grounds of the springs. The exciting Jungle Cruise Speedboat Ride is a 5mile trip along the Silver River. The famous glass bottom boats of Florida Silver Springs, giving thousands of visitors the thrill of a lifetime as they look into the crystal clearar depths beneath them. And when you've seen all these things at Florida's Silver Springs, there is still the bathing beach to be visited for a refreshing dip in the wonderfully clear water.

To find out more about how these postcards were produced, we'll return to Chicago where an order for another underwater card was submitted by Ray and Davidson in 1950. Company production files show the original black and white photograph on which the card is based along with a tissue overlay with design instructions for Teich artists to make the waters crystal clear, color the divers bathing suits, and (somewhat insistently) to "please be careful".

The instructions for this 1950 card also refer artists to an existing card for retouching and color guidance. If we follow that trail, we can see that the production file for that 1942 card refers to a 1940 card for the reading matter on the back. The files for this earlier card refers itself to a 1935 card for that same purpose. And if we take this process one step further, we see instructions to use the art from a 1928 card that, like so many of these Ray and Davidson cards did over the decades, emphasizes the clarity of the water, as well as what that clarity makes visible.

The trail goes cold there. But this quick montage is a reminder of how these individual card designs are linked by form and content as a result of choices made by photographers, the park owners and staff, and Teich employees during the design and production process.

Let's shed a bit more light on how individual people exhibit behavior that perpetuates genres. Remember this card here and the tissue overlay for the photograph, the back of which is seen here. Remember that green handwriting? This card was part of a larger order that included nine other cards. One of these shows a Silver Springs attraction known as the horseshoe palm. This card shows the tree from the reverse perspective of an existing card referenced in the directions to the artists. Also included is a tissue overlay with green handwriting, instructing the artist to, as always, "make the water crystal clear", "Show good color details" for the buildings in the background,make the palm consistent with the existing card shown previously, and my personal favorite to "please be most careful," with emphasis.

So, who was this slightly overbearing verdance-ophile? Could it be Geo? Yes, it's Geo. George G. Heunisch, Orlando-based Teich rep from at least as early as the 1930s to as late as the 1960s, according to company records, whose territory was the state of Florida.

All right, pay attention now because we're only going to do this once. Isn't that amazing? In an era before color photography was a commercially viable medium, Teich and Company took hundreds of thousands of black and white photographs and transformed them into full-color views that captured the imaginations of everyday Americans, impressing upon them a certain vision of the nation, a vision that emphasized place, motion, progress, industry, and perhaps above all, idyllic beauty. And for the state of Florida, for at least the latter half of the company's operation, most of those card designs were orchestrated by George G. Heunisch, of Orlando.

Join us for our next episode in which we'll discover more about Heunisch's design practices, specifically how he navigated generic resistance when an order came in for a set of cards for Ray and Davidson's second park, Paradise Park, which under Florida's segregation era laws operated exclusively for black visitors.

References