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Many of us are old enough to recall the first color photos we saw after years of black and white, and then when color film and processing finally became somewhat affordable, our photo albums changed forever. Though I had certainly seen color photos for many years, I recall the first roll of photos that I personally shot with color film. It was in the summer of 1967, and the camera was my high school’s Yashica 12 twin-lens reflex camera. I had just been appointed the yearbook photographer for the next year. Somewhere, I still have those photos, taken at a road course USAC race at Indianapolis Raceway Park. My dad was with me.

Fast backward a few decades before that and imagine the attraction of color postcards when all commercially available photographic film produced black and white photographs. Postcards had been black and white for as long as anyone could recall, and then they became available with color, though somewhat crudely colored in some cases. Standing at a rack of postcards at Taylor’s Drug Store, picking one to send to Aunt Myrtle back in Pennsylvania, which will you pick, color or black and white? Probably the color one.

Prior to the common usage of color photographic film, real photo postcards were black and white photos that were then either hand-colored (not commercially feasible due to labor expense), colored with dies using masks or templates, or over-printed one color at a time. In either of the latter two operations, quality and accuracy of color were sometimes lacking, but the addition of color was still a selling point.

Rather than relate the history of all of the processes here, we invite you to explore the resources shown below. Depending on your level of nerdiness, it’s an interesting study. In the meantime, enjoy these early colorized Tullahoma postcards and imagine receiving them when they were new. Tullahoma’s two leading hotels had several colorized cards over the years, no doubt popular with guests. We show two here.

Resources: Wikipedia’s “History_of_postcards_in_the_United_States”; The Postcard Album (tpa-project.info/html/body_postcard_history.html)

If you have interesting photos and stories from Tullahoma’s or Coffee County’s past, please message me at alanmayes@lighttube.net. I can quickly scan your photos and return them to you within a day. Thanks