Fill out this form to email this article to a friend
Sunset for the postcard
It was once the calling card for the slightly mythical Florida of tourists' dreams. Now the digital age is eroding an industry and the career of a postcard virtuoso.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published March 18, 2005
 |
|
[Times photo: Lara Cerri]
|
Tom Brown has been making postcard images for the tourist industry for more than 35 years. But times are changing. Here he prints an image of Clearwater Beach over shot glasses in his Largo studio.
|
LARGO - Probably the most famous photographer nobody ever heard of around here is a tan and taciturn man named Tom Brown. Generations of Floridians have admired his portraits of bridges and beaches, pelicans and laughing gulls, manatees and alligators. His sunsets cause hearts to go pitty-pat.
His photos are found on postcards displayed on racks throughout West Florida. He has sold millions over the last 35 years, mostly to tourists who wanted to make relatives back home jealous.
"Greetings From Florida!" his postcards almost holler. "While we are cavorting on the beach or smelling orange blossoms you are probably shoveling snow."
But now everything is changing. While hardly an endangered species, the postcard is no longer quite the romantic symbol of a Florida visit that it used to be. A postcard is seldom a tourist's first purchase upon arriving at the beach. Nor even the second or third. In the space age, the classic "Come to Florida" postcard is a hot-air balloon, a quaint memory from another century.
"People don't send them as much anymore," laments Brown, 65, sprawled in front of his office computer at Tom Brown Card Co. near Ulmerton Road. "A tourist is more more likely to take his own picture with a digital camera and e-mail it to the relatives."
Old enough to collect Social Security, Brown can remember the golden years when he sold more than 2-million postcards. He can remember when he sold 20,000 copies of one special postcard in a few short weeks. It was his famous aerial photograph of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge taken immediately after a freighter knocked it down in a storm in 1980. He is sure he would have sold thousands more if the printer could have kept up.
He can tell similar stories about photos of grand hotels and wind-swept beaches, of sand dollars and key lime pies.
Last year he placed about half a million cards in shell shops, gift stores and motel lobbies. A half million sounds like a huge number unless you are in the postcard business. Then it means barely making expenses. His wife, Sandy - she is his sales staff - says, "We had to live off our credit cards."
Tom Brown always liked those postcard sunsets. But he doesn't like the idea that the sun is going down on the postcard business.
Paradise on a postcard
It is almost impossible for a historian to think of Florida tourism without thinking about postcards. "They were joined at the hip," says USF history professor Gary Mormino, author of A Social History of Florida. As hotels went up in the Roaring '20s, as tourists traveled here by train every winter, postcards documented the new "come on down" culture of the state.
In the postcard world of Florida, it never rained. There were no mosquitoes. Every beach was patrolled by bathing beauties and every night the moon rose majestically over sparkling water as palms swayed in balmy breezes.
"The effort to publicize and promote green benches and fountains of youth was part P.T. Barnum and part Norman Rockwell," Mormino says. "There was something touching about a postcard of Sunken Gardens or Silver Springs when beauty was enough to touch our sensibilities."
Any respectable coastal town boasted at least one postcard business. Miami had dozens. In Pinellas County, the St. Petersburg Post Card Association cranked out thousands. So did Largo's Litho Sales Co. Ditto for the late Ward Beckett, who hired Tom Brown in 1970.
A wedding photographer, Brown remembers having to relearn everything when he began working for Beckett. "I had the mind of an artist," Brown says, "and being an artist in the postcard business was not good."
He recalls his first hapless attempt at making a postcard. His snappy photo of the bay, with driftwood in the foreground, was rejected out of hand. Beckett pronounced it too artsy.
"He taught me - and it was a good lesson - that a postcard photographer has to pretend he is standing in the tourist's shoes when he makes that photo."
A postcard has to be a cliche, he learned, though a well-composed one. The sunset has to be golden. There should be a big fish at the end of that line instead of a boot. A postcard has to be an ideal, but it has to look as if the tourist might have taken the picture had he owned the right equipment.
The business of beauty
Brown was one of those guys who'd jump into a plane at a moment's notice to get a photo for a new postcard. He can remember shouting at a pilot to slow a plane so he could focus on a hotel. The plane stalled, Brown got his photo, and the pilot got the engine running in the nick of time. For a while, Brown hired ultralight seaplanes to take him up because they cost less. "The pilot said he was running out of gas, but I wanted to get one more photo and get my money's worth so I kept him up there." When the engine stopped, they coasted to a landing on Lake Seminole.
Brown's head for business is as hard as a coconut on one of those old postcards. When he talks about his business, he seldom mentions romance: about how generations of tourists were seduced by the postcard vision of Florida. He is a dollars and cents guy.
He will talk about his favorite sunset postcard because it was among his bestselling postcards of all time. And still is.
"All right. I was driving my wife somewhere one night (years) ago. As we got close to the causeway and I saw that sky - well, I knew it was a 5-million-to-1 sunset with all that orange and the way the clouds looked. I pulled over, got out my camera - I always have my camera - put it on a tripod and made that picture."
It's an old photo, taken by his Linhoff 4-by-5 format, back when he used film. Brown may not be a romantic, but the photo is full of romance. A couple sits on a bench under the cabbage palms gazing out at a causeway seconds after the sun has called it a day. The scalloped clouds are as orange as molten lava.
"I knew I had something good. My secret - well, I probably shouldn't tell anybody this because it's against my commercial interests - but I underexposed that film, made it look darker than it was to make the orange come out. I still like that one. Still sell a lot of them."
The digital era
In the digital age, anybody who owns a camera is potentially a postcardmaker. Snap the photo, download into the laptop while waiting for the latte at Starbucks, then e-mail it to Aunt Matilda in Chicago. No waiting, no stamps, no looking around for a mailbox.
"Everything is different now," Brown says. "Years ago, I remember going into a post office to mail something. The clerk saw my name and said, "You're the postcard guy! I see your name on a million postcards.' That's how it was then. Millions of cards went out of West Florida and my name was on them. Now people don't know me from Adam."
He shoots digital photos himself these days, puts them on a disc, mails the disc to a business in Miami that turns his pictures into cards.
His wife takes the cards from business to business on the beach.
Many of their old reliable customers, the family-owned drugstores and gift shops, have disappeared. The big chain pharmacies don't always stock postcards. The mom-and-pop motels that once catered to families - families that bought postcards - are being redeveloped into condos.
"I used to love to sell postcards on Clearwater Beach," says Sandy Brown as her husband lights up his umpteenth cigarette. "It's hard now. It's hard to even find a place to park so you can go into a store. I try to find loading zones, but sometimes I get tickets."
"I haven't been to the beach in years," her husband says with a scoff. "Too crowded."
Brown is not a person comfortable with the word "leisure." He says he last took a vacation when the first George Bush was president. When you're on vacation you can't make money.
"Now all the money is in souvenirs and not postcards," he says. These days he sells more Florida key chains, Florida shot glasses, Florida piggy banks and Florida paperweights.
"I don't plan to retire though. I won't retire until they shovel dirt over me."
As he talks about the grave, rain batters the parking lot. It isn't a postcard Florida day, but Tom Brown isn't complaining.
"You need sunny days to get the tourists down here," he says without a smile. "But when it rains, tourists can't go to the beach. They might go into the gift shops."
Times researcher Mary Mellstrom contributed to this report.
- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727) or klink@sptimes.com
ON THE WEB
Lisa's Postcard Page: the history and lore of postcards - www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/2487/
Postcards: the Jacksonville Public Library Collection - jpl.coj.net/DLC/Florida/pc/PCindex3.html
[Last modified March 17, 2005, 08:55:02]
Share your thoughts on this story
|
News
Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Print
Email story
Comment
Email editor
