My brother, Mike, runs an estate sale company, Metro Detroit Estate Sales (shameless plug intended). From time to time, he’ll call me when a sale he’s conducting includes some electronics or ham radio gear.

A couple of months ago, he called and said that this most recent sale included a bunch of miscellaneous amateur radio-related stuff. The owner of the house, who passed away, was the daughter of W8HZN, and the estate included some of his logbooks, some old QSL cards from the 1930s, and some Popular Electronics magazines from the 1960s.

This evening, I finally got around to looking at the QSL cards. One of the things that struck me was that so many of them were hand-made. Apparently, they would purchase post cards from the post office (only a penny each, including postage!) and created their own designs.

This first one was one of the more elaborate. Hamtramck is a city completely surrounded by the city of Detroit.

Many hams had stamps made with their call signs. They would stamp their call on a postcard and add the rest of the information by hand.

This card is notable because it has three different colors.

One thing that you’ll notice is that all of these card are brown with age. You can imagine what they would have looked like 90 years ago.

There were more than 100 QSL card in the box that my brother found, so this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ll be writing more about this treasure trove of ham radio history in the future.