Valentine's Day Brings Tender and Rough Greetings

1910

PETTY SPITE AND TENDER MISSIVES MINGLED IN MAIL

School Children, Grown-Up Women and Even Business Men Prepare for Valentine.

THOUSANDS ARE BOUGHT

Mail Will Be Loaded With Letters Bearing Tender and Rough Greetings

"This heer looks like teccher."

Hundreds and thousands of school children, wherever Valentine's day is a recognized institution, are today with laborious effort and ink bedaubed fingers preparing the hideous caricatures bearing inscriptions like the above, which will tomorrow give their instructors the pupil's conception of their mental and physical shortcomings.

Likewise, Mrs. Flaherty, who last summer made a remark reflecting on the girth line of Mrs. Hoolihan, just around the corner, will receive a carefully enclosed but unsigned tribute which may depict her either as a "cat" or a "gadabout." They all forget to put on the name with the original draft, but Mrs. Flaherty, like all the rest of womankind, is never uncertain of the source, and hurrying into her best "rags" just as promptly visits the corner drug store. The next mail brings the answer and the merry war is on.

Full grown men, too, men of affairs and recognized business ability, take advantage of the opportunity offered to vent petty spite and grievances against their competitors and business adversaries.

The day is also one, however, which marks the universal exchange of pretty sentiments and tender missives of love. Today and tomorrow the mails will be encumbered with delicately framed boxes carefully tied with baby ribbons, from which emanates the scent of the perfumed missives.

Some will be beautifully engraved and embellished, while others will carry only hastily scrawled notes in school boy hand. All will carry the name sentiment, however, of childish affection and adoration of first love and as Nellie with coy diffidence exhibits the missive to mamma and receives the reproof she expected, she fails to detect the flicker of the eye or the unconscious softening of the lines about the mouth, as mamma's mind reverts back to a similar occasion in her own life, when a similar missive was received and she was rebuked in the same manner.

--The Des Moines News, Des Moines, Iowa, February 13, 1910, page 8.

Comment: I had never heard of Valentine cards meant as insults, but it looks like they really did that. At Wikipedia, there's an article on "vinegar valentines" that says, "Vinegar valentines are greeting cards, or, rather, insult cards, that come in the form of an insult, decorated with a caricature and, below that, an insulting poem. Ostensibly given on Valentine's Day, the caricature and poem is about the "type" that the recipient belongs to--spinster, floozy, dude, scholar, etc. ... The cards were first produced in the late Victorian era and enjoyed their greatest popularity in that period and in the first quarter of the 20th century."