Antique & Vintage Postcards

Bartlesville, Oklahoma's Masonic Building rises nine air-conditioned stories above the oil-boom town that Frank Phillips built, its buff brick upper floors contrasting crisply with the terracotta-banded base and green canvas awnings at street level — a building whose identity was inseparable from Cities Service Oil and Gas, the energy giant that occupied eight of its nine floors and whose pumping operations defined northeast Oklahoma's economy for generations. Published by MWM Color-Litho of Aurora, Missouri, this crisp unused linen postcard (catalog no. 5435) captures the building at its commercial peak, likely produced in the 1940s when Cities Service was at full wartime output. The back is clean and unmailed, with only a penciled "TCS" and remnants of tape at corners suggesting it was once stored in an album.