Keeping the Flame Alive

Here’s a great find. This double-framed holiday greeting was produced by the 17th Signal Service Company on a teletype. The paper is extremely delicate, so we’re not taking this out of the frame to look for dates or signatures just yet. However, the tones, size, paper type, and pre-ASCII style would suggest it’s from the 1940s-60s. The practice of sending these around was already well-established by the early 1940s, with text-image holiday greetings often shared by the Associated Press.

According to Wikipedia, the company was active in three main phases: 20 November 1942 – 18 February 1946; 5 July 1950 – 25 September 1965; and 16 March 1981 – 17 August 2006. So we’ll say, it’s from between 20 November 1942 and 25 September 1965. The original seller suggested it was from WW2, but similar RTTY prints exist from around JFK’s assassination (1963) so we can’t assume it’s from the war. This site gives some more context (quotes, photos) — you can at least get a sense of the possible spaces, gear, and conditions from which this was created / sent.