When it came to publishing picture postcards in the early part of the 20th century, German immigrant Curt Otto Teich became the undisputed “king of postcard publishing.”
Teich was born March 23, 1877, in Greiz, Germany, which is in the state of Thuringia in east-central Germany. His parents were Christian and Elise Tamm Teich. Curt had six siblings. The Teich family came from a long line of printers and had a coat of arms with a display of early printing tools dating to 1725. Curt’s father, Christian, was a printer, newspaper publisher and book salesman. Curt’s grandfather, Friederich Karl Wilhelm Teich, published a book of poetry and wrote articles for various periodicals. Curt followed in the family tradition after attending high school in Dresden until age 15. He returned to the family home in Lobenstein to serve as a printer’s apprentice.
While learning the family business in Germany, Curt’s brother, Max, traveled to Chicago to visit the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. After the two-year fair, Max remained in Chicago to enter the hotel business. He bought the Wyoming Hotel and renamed it the Kaiserhof Hotel. Christian Teich saw business opportunities for printing in America. Curt and his father had a business disagreement after which Curt bought a one-way ticket aboard a steamship bound for America. He arrived in New York on April 5, 1895, with just the clothes on his back. After a few days in New York, Curt found employment as a “printer’s devil,” a multitasking apprentice. Teich already knew the business, but he had to make a living in this new land.
After working for a few years in New York, Curt moved to Chicago and opened his own printing firm on January 4, 1898. Curt’s brother, Max, was a partner in the business and provided start-up costs for the new venture from his hotel business profits. They incorporated the firm with Max owning 130 shares and Curt 80 shares. Another brother, Alfred, joined the business with 40 shares after coming to Chicago. The focuses of the company were printing and lithographing, publishing, importing of art printing, and manufacturing and importing souvenir items.
Before getting into the postcard printing business, Teich suffered through the Financial Panic of 1893, which was a serious depression that lasted until 1897. Many visitors to the world’s fair remained in Chicago making every profession and trade position overcrowded. His printing firm specialized in job, newspaper and magazine printing. Competition was fierce and price cutting was prevalent. The business earned them a “fair living,” but Teich wanted the company to prosper in his newly adopted country.
Curt became a naturalized citizen on November 24, 1899 in Chicago. Teich was listed in the 1900 census as a U.S. citizen. He was 27 years old and was a “printer” by trade. In 1905, a “postcard craze” swept across the nation. Curt took the opportunity to travel from Chicago to St. Petersburg, Florida, via the railroad. Then he traveled 2,500 miles west to the Pacific Coast. At each stop, he took hundreds of pictures of businesses, buildings and especially the main streets of each community. These images would serve as the basis for his first large-print runs of illustrated postcards. He charged $1 for 1,000 cards of each view. Curt sold enough cards to merchants and individuals to generate $30,000 ($770,000 in today’s money).
After returning to Chicago as a successful businessman, he decided to focus on the postcard printing industry. Most of Teich’s postcard competitors had their cards printed abroad in Germany or England. Curt wanted to print his own cards in Chicago. As the business increased in size, he moved to larger buildings to house his large printing machines.
Teich met and fell in love with Anna Louise Niether. They married on July 15, 1909. She was the daughter of Friederich Hermann Niether and Louise Elizabeth Kuhnen Niether. Friederich was a bookkeeper by trade. The Teichs had five children while living in Chicago.
By 1910, Teich needed a larger building to house his offset printing presses for printing postcards. Under his leadership, his postcard company continued to grow. He was best known for his large letter “Greetings From” postcards of the many communities. That type of postcard had originated in Germany in the 1890s. He introduced them to America in 1904. Curt employed hundreds of traveling salesmen who sold picture postcards to domestic businesses and residents. The salesmen also photographed businesses and other interesting buildings to create advertising postcards and ones for sale to the public.
Curt was a pioneer in offset printing. He needed presses that would print 32 cards at a time. The presses needed to be 38-by-52 inches in surface area. The Scott Printing Press Company of New York was able to manufacture 30 presses for Teich’s company. Each press was 30 feet long, 10 feet wide and 10 feet tall. The presses could produce 2.5 million cards per hour.
Teich was unaware that his employees were disgruntled in the 1920s. Most of them struck the company for higher pay and fewer hours. The strike lasted for nine months with substitute workers. When it was over, Teich employed over 1,000 employees across several departments: sales, advertising, art, photo lithography, photography, and business. Many of them were German immigrants. He hired ones who were extremely skilled in the printing trade. According to Teich, “when German artists came to the U.S.A., they found employment with Curt Teich and Company.”
In 1922, Teich built a five-story building on an empty lot to house his printing operations. It was designed by his brother, Frederick, who was an architect in Chicago. The interior floors were designed to hold heavier machinery used to print the cards.
Three years later the Teich family moved to the upscale Glencoe suburb. Their house had six bedrooms and seven bathrooms. Curt reported its value in 1930 at $100,000. That same house sold in 2015 for $2,400,000. He was now considered a wealthy businessman but Curt still possessed German frugality. If the peelings on vegetables served in his house were too thick, he would reprimand the kitchen staff.
With the advent of the Great Depression starting in 1929, businesses around the nation took a big hit. Unemployment rose and consumer spending plummeted. While other printing companies folded, Curt saw the opportunity to travel in Europe, solicit orders from foreign clients, and learn new printing methods to improve his products. The Great Depression provided Teich the impetus to discover creative new processes when he solicited entrepreneurial possibilities available to him. He also went to Central and South America soliciting orders in the 1930s.
In 1935, Curt made a trip to Germany to learn the newest printing methods. His fluency in German helped facilitate the processes. He learned to eliminate the lithography stones used in color printing in favor of a four-color process he called “C.T. American Art,” which was quite complicated. A variation of this form was called “C.T. Art Colortone”. He did not protect this process with a patent, so his competitors copied it.
Curt declared in 1938 that his No. 1 bestselling postcard was the White House in Washington, D.C. Niagara Falls was No. 2, and Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser was No. 3. The next year Teich suffered two heart attacks, so he decided to turn the business over to Curt Teich Jr. His brother, Ralph Teich, called him “Little Napoleon” because of his dictatorial ways.
The Teich Company boomed during World War II and was very profitable since many people sent and received postcards. Curt Jr. declared in 1944 that sales in 1943 were “almost unbelievable.” Most of the company’s sales were from existing views. During the war, the company retooled for defense work printing over 3 million maps for the invasions of Europe and Japan. The Teich family became a “Gold Star” family when Lt. Lawrence E. Teich was killed at the Battle of Corregidor.
Curt Sr. retired after the war. He was listed in the “Who’s Who?” in Chicago from 1936 forward. The listing contained his name, job title, and business and home addresses. This was because Curt did not fill out his questionnaire. His brother, Max, filled out his for a bigger listing. Curt had always been interested in preserving the past. After many years of requests from his family, Teich wrote his family history titled “Teich Family Tree” in 1958 when he was 80 years old.
Curt and his wife, Anna, decided in the mid-1950s to move away from the Chicago winters to Belleair, Florida. She died there in 1959 and was buried in the mausoleum at Park Cemetery in Skokie, Illinois. Curt died in 1974 at age 96. He was also buried in the same mausoleum next to Anna.
The Teich family sold the company in 1974. The company was renamed Curt Teich Industries. Two years later the company sold it to a printing firm called Regensteiner Publishing Enterprises. That firm was also started by a German immigrant in the late 19th century. By 1978, the name Teich was no longer used in the production of postcards. The Curteichcolor process was sold in 1980 to the John Hine Company, an Irish firm based in Dublin with a branch in California. They print postcards, calendars and tourist souvenirs.
When the Teich family sold the company, it retained all the postcard files, ephemera and images. The family had copies of every postcard they ever printed. The new company had no interest in any of the materials since they were buying the Teich name and printing process. The company was going to throw out all the Teich postcard files. Fortunately, Curt’s son, Ralph, saved truckloads of postcards and files from winding up in the landfill.
Thus, the story of Curt Otto Teich is like that of many German immigrants’ stories from the late 1800s. Curt started his own company and provided quality products for the public. He became very successful and wealthy. Teich became one of the most prolific postcard printers in the United States during the first half of the 20th century printing up to 250 million postcards annually. These included views from over 10,000 American towns and businesses, as well as places in over 100 foreign countries. Curteich postcards are the most reasonably priced cards at postcard shows because of the millions of cards his company produced.
The popularity of Teich’s postcards reflected the greater mobility of the middle class, small-town tourism, and the important part that Teich’s postcards played in American culture. His family donated the entire archives to the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois, in 1978. Teich’s legacy is contained in the immense graphic archive that celebrates the everyday visual language of America. It is the largest public postcard collection in the United States. That immense collection was transferred to the Newberry Library in 2016, and it will be scanned to put online to celebrate Teich’s influence on American culture.
Curt Teich (Curt Teich & Company, C.T.- Curteich, Bluesky, Photofinish, American Art colored) postcards are found everywhere in America including Effingham County. Teich probably selected Effingham because of its location and associated railway lines. Some of his postcards were colored ones, but many were good, grey-scale images of buildings and scenes. Most of them have white borders with the name of the building or scene, Effingham, Illinois, and “The Heart of the USA”. That descriptive phrase was developed by Henry and Ada Kepley as a way to promote Effingham. They were both local lawyers and enthusiastic promoters of Effingham. I have many Curt Teich postcards in my collection of Effingham County postcards. Most postcard collectors have several examples of Curteich postcards.
If you have any questions or comments about Curteich postcards, feel free to contact me at wootongs@gmail.com or call me at 217-342-6280.