Funny Valentines Day British Guy You Aint Gettin No D
Roses are red, Some verses are blue; There's plenty of money In 'I Love You'.
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February 10, 1974
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I have been looking for a valentine to buy for my wife. As usual, the drugstores and gift shoppes are full of them. But one valentine, from American Greetings Corporation, Cleveland, shows a little guy a bow tie walking and talking to himself, saying, "I searched all over town trying to find one of those Sweet, Sentimental Valentines to send you. . . . Finally, I asked a sweet old lady in a card shop and she said that they don't make them like that no more! So, I got you this one . . [turn over] . . . BE MY VALENTINE, YOU BIG NUT!"
Hey, you guys at American Greetings Corporation, they do so make them like that some more! In fact, the ratio of sentimental to comic valentines sold by the world's largest card shop, the 20.000‐square‐foot main store of Fifth Avenue Cards, Inc., at its headquarters in the Empire State Building, is about 20 to 1. The smutty valentines of a few seasons ago ("May the bluebird of happiness . . . [turn over] . . . crap on your head") have lost almost all of their rack space to sexy cards ("Valentine, I'm sure glad we're friends . . . [turn over] . . . I'd sure hate doing those things with stranger"). Still, it isn't really hard to find any kind of valentine this year (except perhaps a valentine that shows excellence in writing and/or design). For this is America, where Saint Valentine's Day is no longer a saint's feast day but has been transformed—in the memorable phrase of American historian Daniel Boorstin—into a "Festival Consumption."
As I searched for a valentine to serve as a token of my love, I was nearly carried away by some of the main currents of American emotion. "Nothing reflects the times we live in like greeting cards," Irving Cohen, president of Fifth Avenue Cards, had told me. His company operates the nation's largest network of greeting‐card shops‐60 shops in 45 cities in 16 states, with sales around $10‐million in 1973, up $3‐million from 1972. "Greeting cards deal in emotion," he said, "so the cards people buy tell you what their emotions are." But what was my emotion, in thinking of my wife?
I looked first at a rack of "Hallmark 'Thinking Free' Cards—For Today's Woman." There was, felt, something patronizing about things like "For a wonderful woman who makes every day a good day/ Not only for others but for herself" (50 cents), which my wife wouldn't like any more than I liked "From a liberated woman/ to the man who set me free" (35 cents). "We sell many 35‐cent cards for wives to give to their husbands," said David Cohen, a vice president of Fifth Avenue Cards. "Very few husbands would dare spend less than half a buck on a valentine for his wife." I deduced that another 35‐cent card (American Greetings Corporation), which celebrated rape as an approach to love, was meant for single fellows. "Valentine—I'd like to grab you," began the sentiment. (The message on a greeting card, rhymed or unrhymed, is known as "the sentiment"; if it rhymes, it can also be called "the verse.") The card pictured a boy leaping on a girl from behind, causing her to drop her icecream cone. "Then I'd like to kiss you/ then I'd like to — you and — you and — you, over and over and over."
The sex‐manual approach to love was celebrated in the American Greetings "Hi‐Brow" line with card that cost 75 cents and could therefore apparently be purchased by a self‐respecting husband for his self‐respecting wife. "Now, Valentine, your most embarrassing questions are answered plain, everyday language by Dr. Rooban, the world famous authority on sexy stuff," reads the sentiment, which is supplemented by a rotating cardboard disk containing peepholes so you can dial the questions you were afraid to ask. (Sample: "Is there still anything that's morally wrong to in bed?" Answer in the peephole: "Yes, eating crackers.")
But I also found more conventional greetings. "Where There Is Love" is the title of this year's Valentine's Day offering by Helen Steiner Rice, who at 73 is the poet laureate of the greeting‐card world. Her verse, for Gibson Greeting Cards, Inc., of Cincinnati, which has sold "many millions" the 246 "inspirational poem" cards she has produced, reads:
Valentines are Gifts of Love And with the help of God above Love can change the human race And make this world a better place—For love dissolves all hate and fear And makes our vision bright and clear So we can see and rise above Our pettiness on "wings of love."
"I can't fault Noroross's inspirational stuff," said David Cohen, "but as far as we're concerned, Helen Steiner Rice is the only one who sells."
Mrs. Rice, the widow of a New York banker, was lecturing on "Women's Contributions to Banking and Commerce" back in 1931 when E. P. Gibson, president of Gibson Cards and son of the founder, heard her speak. Impressed, he hired Mrs. Rice as a general verse writer. According to Fred Wagner, the vice president and secretary of Gibson Cards today, Gibson originally granted Mrs. Rice the privilege of signing her verses (she is one of the very few greeting‐card writers or artists ever allowed to sign their own work) because buyers had begun to recognize her style and "it added to the merchandising of the product. . . . Then, just before Thanksgiving Day in 1960, one of her verses was read over nationwide TV on the Lawrence Welk show. That's when her works really started taking off."
Gibson charges only a quarter for Mrs. Rice's exhortation to rise above pettiness. But Paramount of Pawtucket, R.I., is asking $5 (the top price a new valentine this year) for this mercifully signed "Gift of Love":
You are thought of with affection Every day throughout the year, But it's extra nice to tell you so When special days are here. So here's a Valentine to bring A special gift for you, To tell you once again how much You're loved the whole year through?
Hallmark's valentine lyrics consist of one‐liners from great poets and famous writers: "I love with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!" abeth Barrett Browning, 75 cents); "Beauty is light in the heart" (Kahlil Gibran, 75 cents). each of these quotations, the Hallmark creative staff has added an original line on the second —to Mrs. Browning: "All my love, all my life"; Gibran: "Have a light, bright, delightful day!"
American Greetings also uses the work of a mous name. "I love your smile. It warms me [turn over] . . . right down to the tips of my declares a card signed by Rose O'Neill. A note the back certifies that "this is an authentic Kewpie TM design. All kewpies are the creation of O'Neill (1874 to 1944), world renowned artist writer who is best known as the 'Mother of Immortal Kewpies.'"
But famous poets and writers are not what valentines best, according to David Cohen. is the hottest thing in the market—bar none," said, showing me a "Parachrome images" "created by Paramount." It is described by as "the photography look on acetate," and the timent starts in words of white on a pinkish focus photograph of a young woman wearing a crocheted hat a la Ali McGraw, smelling flowers one exposure and kissing a young man in another: "This Valentine is special . . . [turn over] . . . cause it's for you! Love and happy Valentine's Day."
"American Greetings introduced the Soft card at the New York stationery show in 1971," said Cohen. "They started the washed‐out photo look. Then Paramount came out with an tate overlay of a Soft Touch‐type photo of a girl and a guy in some natural setting like a with a quick, short sentiment as opposed to verse."
Who can beat the soft‐sell of the Soft Touch‐style card? Hallmark is trying this Valentine's Day going even softer. "Souvenirs of Love" combines the shadowy, pretty‐girl idea of the American Greetings Soft Touch and the quick, short verse the Paramount "Parachrome images" with the lace look of the old‐fashioned paper valentine:"I don't care what tomorrow brings ... [turn over]... as long as it brings you."
But which of these cards should I buy for my wife? No patriotic American can afford to make lightly a decision affecting a billion‐dollar American industry. "As, of last year," according to Henry Cooper, executive director of the National Association of Greeting Card Publishers, "it was commonly understood that we passed the billion‐dollar mark in retail sales." And yet, Cooper told me, the annual 10 per cent jump in the number of greeting cards sold ended about 1970. "For the last three years, there's been a leveling off," he said. "Companies are reasonably sure it's because Congress took away our third‐class privilege in 1971 under which the first two ounces could be sent in an unsealed envelope for just 6 cents."
We were sitting in the association's offices in the Pan Am Building beneath Mr. Cooper's personally autographed photographs of the last five American presidents. As a former public‐relations director for CARE and the Lions Clubs, he explained, he had had dealings with them all. (A medallion on his desk picturing President Nixon was autographed "With personal appreciation for your generous support of our 1972 campaign.")
"Though the unit sales are down the last couple of years," Mr. Cooper explained, "our dollar sales have held because the price of cards has gone up. This is not a bad thing for the companies because they make fewer cards but make more money at it." Of the seven billion greeting cards manufactured each year, he said, about 3.5 billion will be bought at Christmastime; the second most popular occasion is Valentine's Day. "Valentines last year and this year will run somewhere around two billion sold," said Mr. Cooper. The other big card holidays, ranking considerably below Christmas and Valentine's Day in retail sales, are Mother's Day, Easter and Father's Day, in that order.
The way to get rich from greeting cards, however, is to manufacture them rather than write or design them. Fred Wagner, vice president and secretary of Gibson, told me that "a good writer who can produce can make $12,500 a year and up at Gibson." How far up, I asked. "The top guy would get between $25,000 and $30,000," he answered. Thus the salaries of top writers in the greeting‐card field are not competitive with the salaries of top copywriters in the. ad agencies of the major greeting‐card companies; even so, greeting‐card writers probably make more money from their verse than the best poets in America.
Greeting‐card artists are in the same boat. Fred Sondern, who was recently permitted to sign his first card, has been designing for Norcross for 22 years. "You work at your own pace," he told me, but conceded that output and sales of an artist's work are the big factors. Mr. Sondern's pace is about three cards a week. He started at Norcross "at under $100 a week." Now he makes "over $20,000 a year" as a member of a staff of 37 designers. He said he had never heard of a staff artist who made as much as $30,000 a year and that "greeting cards are not a freelance industry." To supplement salaries, he said, "a number of us do freelance art work in other fields."
Henry Cooper did not know the average (industrywide) price of a valentine, but Irving Cohen knows the average price of the valentines he sells — 42 cents. (He also knows that the younger generation is not as occasionoriented and that "the nonoccasion card, which was practically nonexistent before the fifties, is becoming an ever stronger factor in the greeting‐card industry.") Mr. Cooper also explained that "the valentine card does not really have a religious background. It's a love holiday but not a religious one—like Christmas."
That, of course, is not the way it was when I was in the fourth grade at St. Mary's Catholic School in Rockford, Ill. I remember Valentine's Day of 1944 as a particularly pure celebration of this ancient festival. Our teacher, Sister Marie Elise, was particular about calling the holiday Saint Valentine's Day, and she told us stories about Saint Valentine. She said that he was a Catholic priest in Rome when Christianity was a new religion. He raised beautiful flowers in his garden and gave many of them to the children who lived nearby. One day, the children came for flowers and found that the Roman Emperor had put Valentine in prison because he wouldn't honor the Romans' pagan gods. (I remember imagining Charles Laughton as the Roman Emperor, saying something like, "Perhaps a prison cell will impress you with the power of Roman gods"; Sister Marie Elise never described the meaty scenes.)
The Roman children missed Valentine. They picked bouquets of field flowers, tied notes to them and tossed them through the barred window of Valentine's cell. Sister Marie Elise said the notes told Valentine that the children loved him. Eventually, the pagan Romans put Valentine to death, and ever since, Sister Marie Elise said, Christians have been sending messages to each other on the anniversary of his murder, messages saying, "I love you."
The way we celebrated the holiday at St. Mary's was certainly not commercial. Sister Marie Elise would make a valentine box out of a big shoe box decorated with a red poster‐paper heart. (Remember what big shoes nuns wore in 1944?) We drew names to see who would make a valentine for whom. Sister Marie Elise wanted to make sure that everyone got a valentine and that no one got more than anyone else. I suppose that was to keep us from being jealous or envious, which emotions were identified in "Examination of Conscience for Boys and Girls" by A. J. Wilwerding, S. J. (The Queen's Work Press, St. Louis, Mo., 1927) as being venial (not deadly) sins against the Seventh and Tenth Commandments. However, Sister's precautions were unavailing. When I drew the name of Wanda Cwyner ("Fatso, Fatso/ two by four/ can't get through the/ schoolhouse door"), I groaned until silenced by Sister. And when James Ingwalson drew the beloved name of Dorothy Ferraro, I groaned again, for she was my true Valentine. And when Barbara Chiodini drew my name, she blushed, and the other girls cheered, and I tried to act cool, for Virginia Murphy had told me in strictest confidence that Barbara liked me ... a lot. (Paul Roberts got to be postman and hand out the valentines because his mother had died that year and Sister Marie Elise was always making allowances for him.)
Sister would then show us how to make our own valentines. (Store ‐ boughten valentines were verboten, because some of the families couldn't even afford St. Mary's tuition of $1 a month per child, and Sister would not embarrass them by asking then to compete in conspicuous consumption.) To make a perfectly serviceable lace‐doily valentine, all you had to do was fold a sheet of the principal's typewriter paper in quarters, snip off the corner with a double fold and make cutouts along the folded edges for heart and diamond designs. Then you cut a fancy edge along the other two sides, made two more folds in the paper and cut out the designs. You then opened the doily, used a straight pin to prick designs around the cut outs and used flour‐and‐water paste to attach it to a sheet of red poster paper — which St. Mary's supplied. Then you pasted a fancy figure in the center. My fancy figure was fancier than most. It was a free‐hand drawing of Dopey, Disney's dwarf, and I was proud of it—although I considered it wasted on Wanda. Dorothy, if you ever read this, it was drawn for you. Hubbahubba.
Little did I realize then that this traditional saint's day for lovers was to be secularized and transformed into another American Festival of Consumption, which we would observe by sending billions of machine‐made valentines to a full range of acquaintances in the name of proclivities that range from true love to a mere fondness for sex as a leisure‐time activity. ("There are other things in the world besides making love," says a new Hallmark card,. "but say, we've got a sure thing, why not stick with it?")
Giving handmade valentines as tokens of affection was a custom brought to America by the settlers from England. There, the custom of sending verses on Valentine's Day has been traced to a Frenchman, Charles, Duc d'Orleans, who sent his wife a rhymed love letter on Valentine's Day from his confinement in the Tower of London after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. It was also the French who first began ornamenting Valentine's Day love verses with gilt paper, ribbons, cut‐out hearts and real lace.
By the 18th century, Englishmen could buy booklets called "Valentine Writers," which contained verses suitable for copying onto giltedged sheets of paper. But it was probably an American who improved on the idea by printing a booklet containing not only "Be My Valentine" verses for men to send but Answers" which women could return. ("Your valentine is very kind/ Nor did a cool reception find;/ Your company gave me delight,/ When I danced with you t'other night;/ Then mutually did we incline,/ Our hearts to love, my Valentine.") "Celebrations: The Complete Book of American Holidays," written by Robert J. Myers with the editors of Hallmark Cards, notes that "commercial valentines came out about 1800 and by 1840 were becoming sophisticated." The National Association of Greeting Card Publishers says that "by the middle eighteen ‐ fifties the publishing and distribution of valentines had become quite sizable business."
This enterprise has been credited to a businesswoman named Esther Howland. Hallmark, which has an 1850 valentine manufactured by Miss Howland in its historical collection, describes her as "the first American manufacturer of valentines." It was in 1840 that Miss Howland, then a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Mass., became the first regular publisher of valentines in the United States. She had admired an imported English valentine in her father's stationery store in Worcester, Mass., and had made copies of it to give to her classmates. These were so successful that her father took samples on a sales trip and returned with $5,000 worth of orders.
Miss Howland set up an assembly line to produce her cards — long before Henry Ford set up his to produce cars. Each employe (all female) performed a single operation, then passed the card on to her neighbor. One woman glued tiny paper flowers to paper lace, another painted in leaves, vines and flowers, a third cut out tiny pictures and glued them on the valentines, etc. Eventually, Miss Howland bought machinery to do some of the work and diversified into the manufacture of Christmas cards, May baskets and other holiday favors. At one time, her business earned $100,000 a year.
Esther Howland's American valentines made Valentine's Day more popular in the United States than it had ever been before. Other factories were soon founded to compete with her. Then, in 1847, the post office began to sell 5 and 10‐cent stamps. One or the other of these stamps would take a valentine any place in the United States. Three million valentines were sold in 1847.
America's major contribution to the design of valentines was the comic valentine, printed on cheap paper and called a "penny dreadful" because it sold for a penny and the design was dreadful. The go‐getters responsible were Charles Howard, a cartoonist, and John McLoughlin, a New York printer. When the Civil War started, Americans who wanted to communicate with their soldiers but couldn't think of what to write (or couldn't write) sent valentines. Many of these were the "penny dreadfuls." After the Civil War, two kinds of valentines prospered simulta neously. The first was the so‐called "slam" or "vinegar valentine," which developed from McLoughlin's penny dreadfuls. His representatives traveled throughout the Reconstruction South and raw, frontier West, selling these valentines of vituperation. At the same time, sentimental valentines were becoming more elaborate—and more expensive. In the late Victorian era, when the so‐called "business ethic" was dominant in the industrialized world, the Victorian .home seemed a shelter for those moral and spiritual values that the "commercial spirit" threatened to destroy. The Victorian husband thanked the Victorian wife for maintaining this haven in valentine messages which saluted. her, not as a woman, but as an angel—on cards whose centers were often stuffed satin, with edges trimmed in lace, feathers, tassels, imitation gems, seashells, dried flowers, seaweed and mother, of pearl. Some of these offerings cost as much as $10 apiece.
By the nineteen‐thirties, however, Christmas cards had come to dominate the greeting‐card industry. Isidore Cohen, father of Irving and David and now chairman of the board of Fifth Avenue Cards, had for years operated "temporary" card shops at Christmastime. David Cohen recalls: "You open up in September, keep it open for Christmas, do what business you can, and go out of business after Christmas — fast. But after Christmas of 1938, because the landlord didn't have a new tenant waiting for the store, he said to my old man, 'Hey, Ike—isn't there something else you can sell?' 'What else?' said my Dad. 'Christmas is over.' But he'd always heard there was a holiday called Valentine's Day. So he went to a banker—with the vest and everything—and he asked to borrow $2,000 to buy a stock of cards. He had an idea. He was going to try to start a year‐around card shop. He had no collateral, so the banker said no. But a vice president of the bank liked the idea and told the bank to take a chance on his say‐so.
"A good day at Christmastime had been $18. In one day before Valentine's Day, 1939, we did $450. The store was so small—12 feet wide by 28 feet deep—we had to let one customer out before we could let another customer in. Chock Full O'Nuts called the cops because the line to buy valentines was blocking their entrance. So we were in the year‐around greeting‐card business."
The best was yet to come. "It was the Second World War that created the modern card industry," said Irving Cohen. "The troop movements. The mobility. If it hadn't been for World War II, there wouldn't be any real card industry like we know it today. People wanted to communicate with their loved ones far away — but they didn't know what to say — so they sent cards. Wives, mothers, girl friends, other friends, relatives — they all wanted to send valentines to servicemen.
"During the war, 90 per cent of our sales were to women. Most of the cards were sentimental." (This year, Hallmark offers a valentine "For My Darling in the Service/Happy Valentine's Day/ This year we must spend Valentine's Day far apart/But darling, we'll be together/If only in my heart." This is the type of card that is a big seller during wars.) "After the war," said Irving Cohen, "it wasn't a sentimental time. The whole country was unsettled. Then, in 194748, the Studio Card started to come in. It was more masculineoriented—for the guys who were home from the war. Today, 30 per cent of our sales are to men."
The Studio Card was a tall, thin card—sarcastic and caustic in tone. It introduced the one‐liner as sentiment. This was the kind of American graffiti we as college students sent in the fifties. "Everybody copied them," said David Cohen. "Hallmark had its Contemporary cards. American Greetings had its Hi‐Brow line." Studio‐type valentines reflected the fifties' emotional swing from sentimental to comic that would permit Elvis Presley to replace Sinatra as the top pop singer with songs like "You Ain't Nothin' But a Houn' Dog." And in the six‐ties, valentines reflected what Newsweek blushingly called "The New Candor" with what David Cohen calls "the first dirty valentine." It pictured a mouse climbing a ladder that was propped against an elephant's posterior. The sentiment: "Love will find a way."
The caustic‐comic Studio Card of 1947 was the last "new look" in valentines before the Soft Touch look of 1971 heralded a nostalgic harking back to a time when young lovers gamboled along unpolluted streams in fields free of cigarette butts. (Ironically, what Soft Touch photographs looked like was the soft‐focus commercials for cig
This year's valentines arettes—minus cigarettes, of course—which had just been banned from TV.)
Perhaps the greatest failure of America's modern valentine makers is their inability to capture in memorable verses or designs the moods that they have profited from so hugely. Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers, not the valentines of the nineteen‐forties, are the mirrors in which Middle America continues to see its World War II sentimentalism. The Studio Card look flourished and withered without producing a single American designer or writer of valentines who captured the postwar American mood the way that the valentines of Catherine (Kate) Greenaway (1846–1901) captured the mood of Victorian England. Yet the numbers are there to encourage such artistry. She sold her first valentine for $15. The company that manufactured the design sold 25,000 copies of it.
Meanwhile, the secularization of Valentine's Day has had an unexpected assist from the Vatican, which decided in 1969 that Saint Valentine may never have existed and dropped him from the official liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. This is an ironic last chapter. The Romans celebrated their feast of Lupercalia on Feb. 15 as a pagan love festival. In 496, Pope Gelasius changed the Lupercalia festival to Saint Valentine's Day on Feb. 14 to transform a pagan festival into a celebration of the Christian concept of love.
So what should I buy my wife as a valentine? I had almost settled on Hallmark's 75‐cent one‐liner from Elizabeth Barrett Browning when my wife herself, reading aloud to me from "The World of Willa Cather," innocently revealed that the 1923 reprint of Willa Cather's first published work, a book of poems called "April Twilights" (1903), was dedicated to her father as a valentine. The next day, I found a 1962 edition of "April Twilights," published by the University of Nebraska Press at $5.50. Thus, I bought my wife 37 verses (or "sentiments") for just 50 cents more than I would have paid for only one verse (or "sentiment") from Paramount's anonymous poet and for hundreds of dollars less than I would have had to pay Hallmark for an equivalent number of one‐liners from the Portuguese.
Which gave me an idea—for making Valentine's Day pay and for commemorating the United States 1976 bicentennial. Next year, I'm going to give my wife a book of verse by a living American poet as a valentine. I urge all lovers to do likewise. If enough lovers would give books of verse by living American poets to the ones they love for Valentine's Day, 1975, our, poets might divert a big enough slice of that $1‐billion in retail greeting‐card sales to enable them to buy new suits for 1976. Then our poets would look presentable if they get invited to any bicentennial celebrations.
On the 100th anniversary of this republic, the poets Longfellow, Whittier and Emerson were among our most honored and prosperous citizens, and they were invited to the best celebrations. In the second hundred years of this republic, however, it has gotten harder and harder to get honored if you're not prosperous, and almost impossible to get prosperous if you're a poet. Yet just imagine what the world would say of if America at 200 not only sent its best poets to represent us at our fetes, but made them prosperous in the name of love. If you think about it, you'll realize that our greeting‐card millionaires in particular would be sorry if America didn't care enough to send the very best. Greeting‐card millionaires should be most sensitive to the truth that "Love ... [turn over]. .. means never having to say you're sorry." ■
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/10/archives/roses-are-red-some-verses-are-blue-theres-plenty-of-money-in-i-love.html
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