Tag: Phoenix Arizona

Petley Postcards

A stash of Petley postcards shows Arizona at its mid-century most.

Bob Petley launched Petley Studios in 1945 with twelve comic postcards. Then, he spent the next four decades photographing the mid-century Southwest from behind a windshield. As I catalogue our Arizona collection, it seems every other card is a Petley production.

Bob Petley was born in 1912 in Akron, Ohio. His father developed products for Goodrich Tire and Rubber, including an early balloon tire. Bob drew posters, threw javelin, and boxed. Arthritis brought him to Arizona in 1943. He took a job in display advertising at the Arizona Republic and left it two years later. In 1945, with wartime travel restrictions lifting, he launched Petley Studios, Inc. from his home.

The first cards sold fast, and Petley had wanderlust. He loaded a station wagon with camera equipment and stopped at hotels, restaurants, motor lodges, civic buildings, desert overlooks, and canyon rims. He met people and made deals along the way. He later traded the wagon for a Lincoln Continental, but the method stayed the same: one man, a camera, every road in Arizona.

Petley Studios and mid-century Arizona grew up together. Bob started shooting in 1945. Over the next four decades, Arizona’s population tripled. New hotels opened in Phoenix and Scottsdale. Civic buildings went up in Tucson. Motor courts lined the highway approaches to every city. Petley photographed all of it. At its peak, the company sold more than 25,000,000 cards annually through roughly 3,500 dealers across Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, southwestern Colorado, and eastern California. The catalog reached more than 1,100 known designs for Arizona alone.

Petley was the first postcard publisher to use a Kodak Kodachrome negative for production. Those burnt oranges, deep turquoises, and brilliant blues are not retouched. Kodachrome produced them. A Petley scenic held next to a competing card from the same decade is warmer and more saturated.

The small set here is just the beginning of the sorting and sifting ahead. It’s a short stack by Arizona city. Indian Pipe Cactus National Monument visitor center shows a a flat-roofed brick federal building with breeze-block detailing and 1960s cars in the lot. A Tucson pool scene with the saturated horizontals of a resort afternoon. A Slo-Motion golf cart, straight from the promotional playbook of Sunbelt leisure culture. Hotels, restaurants, and scenic views fill the rest.

Petley sold the business in 1984. He died in Scottsdale in 2006 at 93. Several of his original comic cards are now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Individual cards regularly trade for their enduring content and collectible nature, but no single institution holds a comprehensive set. In 1994, the Tucson Post Card Exchange Club arrived at just over 160 designs, but never the definitive collection.

To Read More

Postcard Road Trip

Mid-century postcards captured the wonder of American road trips in vivid color. This Phoenix to Grand Canyon collection reveals the story of car trips, roadside shops, and the natural landscape of Arizona.

Rural Route Arizona

The Phoenix to Grand Canyon route via Oak Creek Canyon carved through America’s most scenic territory. In the 1940s and 1950s, this remained wild, undeveloped country. Starting in Phoenix, travelers navigated winding two-lane roads through Wickenburg, Yarnell, Prescott, Jerome, Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Flagstaff, and Williams.

Each stop pulsed with its own character. Jerome clung to mountainsides, mining copper. Prescott sprawled as a ranching center and former territorial capital. Wickenburg lured visitors with dude ranch culture. Williams crowned itself “Gateway to the Grand Canyon.” These weren’t pit stops but destinations, each welcoming tourist dollars from America’s growing car culture.

Postcard Economy

These postcards bear the stamp of Curt Teich & Co., a Chicago printing giant that drove America’s postcard industry from the 1930s through 1960s. German immigrant Curt Teich founded the company in 1898 and revolutionized postcard production. His linen postcards introduced soft textures and blazing colors.

Teich built an industrial empire through local connections. Photographers roamed America, documenting main streets and natural wonders. In Chicago, artists hand-colored black and white photographs, enhancing reality to seduce buyers and ultimately define a social aesthetic.

Behind every postcard rack stood a web of relationships, too. Hotel owners, gas station attendants, and gift shop operators ordered cards from Teich’s catalog or commissioned custom designs featuring their establishments. Postcards advertised businesses, provided affordable souvenirs, and satisfied the social duty to send word home.

Long-distance calls cost fortunes. Letter-writing devoured time. Postcards offered quick connection and proof of adventure. They were quick and easy evidence that the sender had escaped ordinary life for landscapes of impossible beauty. For travelers, buying and mailing postcards proved both pretty and practical.

The typical buyer belonged to America’s emerging middle class, newly mobile through car ownership and paid vacations. Families drove from California to see the Grand Canyon. Retirees took first cross-country trips. Young couples honeymooned across the Southwest. Many experienced the American West for the first time. Postcards helped them process and share encounters with the sublime.

Selecting, writing, and mailing postcards became part of American vacation ritual. Weather beautiful, wish you were here—heartfelt sentiments that bridge extraordinary experience and ordinary communication.

These postcards transcend tourist kitsch. They document a pivotal moment when the West was packaged and sold as leisure destination. Enhanced colors and idealized compositions reflect not just Arizona’s appearance, but how Americans wanted to see it—as endless possibility, natural wonder, and escape from urban routine.