A Different Species of Rat

This leather postcard was mailed from Hobart, Indiana, on January 18, 1908.


(Click on images to enlarge)

These "rats," as you may know, were little shaped pads that women used to create the plump hairdos stylish at the time, as illustrated on the postcard. This kind of rat was made of cloth or netting stuffed with something light and voluminous — often a thick wad of the user's own hair, collected by daily pulling it from her hairbrush and saving it in a hair receiver. (Here is an interesting blog post about making such hair-pads.)

The postcard's sender has called out some of her friends for wearing rats, but she's also called out herself (Ethel) and the recipient (Verna) on the caricatures at the lower right and upper right, respectively. The other names I can't read.

Here is the verso:



The recipient, Verna G. Crockett, is easy enough to find. She led a peripatetic life, along with her husband (a clergyman), moving from Pennsylvania where she was born and married (1898) to Chicago (1910 Census), to Denver (1920), to New York (1930), to California (1950), to Idaho, where she died in a nursing home in 1958. And those are just the moves we know about! Her husband, Albert Gordon Crockett, belonged to a family that lived for a time in Hobart (recorded there in the 1910 Census) before moving to Valparaiso; this 1929 article about a family party in Valpo mentions the Rev. A.G. Crockett:


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 6 Sept. 1929.

That may be the Hobart connection, since I can't find evidence that Verna herself ever lived there.

The sender is more of a mystery, since she gives only her first name. Searching on the name "Ethel" in the 1910 Census of Hobart, I find only an Ethel Joy, about five years younger than Verna Crockett. She was the wife of John Joy and the mother of at least five children. Possibly this is our Ethel, but without a surname, I can't know for sure.