The Last of Its Kind

I didn’t think there were any of these left.
The last of my very first QSL cards
The last of my very first QSL cards

This is one of my first QSL cards. To my knowledge, it is the last of its kind in existence. I’ve not yet found any others.

My dad bought me my first QSL cards after I got my Novice class license in 1984.

They were printed by George Vesely, W9SKR, somewhere in Illinois. This had been my father’s preferred QSL card printer for many years. Indeed there are several different versions of my dad’s cards, all printed by W9SKR, still lying around his shack.

I sent a lot of these cards out, but since I changed calls the next year I didn’t save any of them. So this is the only one left. It is stapled to one of the floor joists above my dad’s old basement shack.

I’ll need to clean out his shack and take down all the cards, including this one, soon. But for a little while longer, it’ll remain there, ensconced, as a little piece of history.