By Michael Bushnell
Northeast News
Jan. 6, 2010

Sick of the snow? Tired of living in the deep freeze? We are too, so we’re treating you to a lovely, 1940s image of  a warm beach and a vintage pin-up girl.

Originally sent to Miss Josephine Eakins of 3514 Forest Ave. in Kansas City on Feb. 9, 1943, this Curt Teich Postcard shows a lovely Florida “Glamour Girl” outfitted in seasonal attire on a Florida beach. The message reads: “Hi Josie, how’s everything with you. If you all want anything, wire me and let me know and I’ll see what I can do for you. Bobby.”

Eakins, a member of the armed forces at the time, was stationed at the Naval base in Clearwater, Fla.

Curt Otto Teich was a printer who immigrated to the United States from Lobenstein, Germany, in 1896. Curt Teich & Company opened in January 1898 in Chicago and closed in 1978. The Teich Company was the world’s largest printer of view and advertising postcards.

Following Teich’s death in 1974, the family donated the huge archive of company postcards to the Lake County Discovery Museum in Waukonda, Ill., to be used solely for research and historic purposes. The Teich archive is the largest postcard and ephemera collection in the world, containing images of more than 10,000 towns in North America and 87 foreign countries. There are more than 365,000 computer-cataloged images with more than 2,100 subject headings. The archive also has the nation’s largest collection of Route 66 postcards in the nation.