Parading TV's on Stage The General Electric Postal Card

The General Electric Postal Card is one of the so-called 'Key' items in a collection of US postal cards. The cards are nice because they compliment the specialty collecting area of advertising along with representing an important chapter of postal history.

Product advertising for TV and Radio Sales and Repair in the fifties and early sixties commonly incorporated comic caricatures to convey the commercial message to the consumer. By Comparison, there is much design similarity to these ads, as if the same professional artists were consulted by the various industrial competitors for the subjects. The GE advertising cards are no exception. About 15-20 different advertising designs are thought to have existed for these cards, all identified by 'ETR' numbers on the back. This number probably had some specific meaning within the context of the ad campaign at General Electric. The table of links below provides some of illustrations of these advertisements:

The GE cards are pretty scarce. A couple discovery hoards of them constitute the total supply available to collectors. The Ad Campaign printed 750,000 of them, of which probably only a thousand or so are in existence. Surprisingly, the philatelic community has never heard from anyone who worked for the company with specific details about these ads. One puzzle is the apparently large 'gaps' in the ETR numbers. The thought is that these may have been separate ad groupings and designed to target the success of the endeavor. If there were more than a handful of used GE Cards available, perhaps the postmarks would lend some clues.

Aside from the study of the interesting advertising on these cards, they are significant postal history items. GE Surcharge Type 1 GE Surcharge Type 2 The POD authorized a special Pitney-Bowes Tickometer surcharge to be used to revalue these cards when the post card rate went up to 3 cents in August of 1958. This was done ostensibly to prevent loss of the advertising printing costs on the already preprinted cards. There are two types of overprint, differentiated by the spacing of the overprint inscription. The surcharge is even known to be inverted at lower left on a rare handful of cards.

Used, non-surcharged GE cards with ads from the surcharged cards have turned up recently. In fact, the ad campaign was going on for quite some time prior to the postal card rate change, as proven by this 1952 usage on the UX38 card. Unused non-surcharged cards with the "1000-series" ETR ads also exist and are probably GE ad campaign 'Specimens', or perhaps just remainders.

There has been debate about the virtues of catalogue listings for any of the local revalued postal cards later authorized by several post offices during rate changes subsequent to the GE issue. In rare instances, this local and private surcharging is permitted and continues to turn up when the post card rate changes. For now, the GE card represents the last time the POD officially authorized a specific postal card surcharge overprint.