Club History

Here is a brief history of the club, reprinted from the April 2022 edition of The Virginia Deltiologist:

“It all started in 1976, when Roy Cox and Bill Martin visited from Baltimore and ran a classified ad saying that they were buying/selling postcards at their hotel room. (The late Bill Martin and his wife Mary founded Mary L. Martin Postcards Ltd., which is now run by their daughter Mary and grandson Joey.)

Roy and Bill charged each buyer an extra $1 to raise money to begin a postcard club in Richmond. At the end of the weekend, they handed John Whiting $28, which John held onto as the club’s beginning stake. Two years later, in April 1978, approximately 30 people met at Antique Village and formed the Old Dominion Postcard Club, which held its first official meeting in June 1978.

Then Roy Cox told the members that meetings were nice, but the ODPCC also needed to host a postcard show. Members were taken aback, saying basically, “we don’t even know exactly how to run our new Club and you want us to put on a show as well?” But they figured things out, and the ODPCC’s first postcard show was held in December 1978. It included a Display Board competition, after Roy provided the guidelines and even some exhibit boards for people to use. Ben Duncan won the inaugural Best of Show award for his Santa postcards display board.

Today, John Whiting and Sylvia Regelson are the only original members still around [sadly, Sylvia passed in 2022]. Jeff Eastland (who once ran the ODPCC Show and provided overnight security by sleeping on a cot at the venue), Bill Gilliam and Warren Long were part of a second wave of members that joined around 1980.”