The Touring Tollenger’s Travel Guide

A scarce holiday card sent by a mid-century power couple.

This alliterative Touring Tollenger’s Travel Guide functioned as a personalized holiday greeting card from a couple constantly on the road. The upper half presents a map of the United States, pinpointing “Our Friends Everywhere,” with a bright star marking the location of “Especially You.” The recipient, the Scott Residence of West Chester, Pennsylvania, is identified in the note immediately below: “We may see you one day, next time we get back to PA.” Adjacent is a motorist-themed poem that blends life advice with the pleasures of a road trip.

The card, signed “Bill Tollenger,” was almost certainly a custom production of Bill and Ida Tollenger, who married in 1946 and were living in St. Louis by 1953. Ida was a professional artist, illustrator, designer, and printmaker who studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati before continuing her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. During the couple’s time in Japan, where Bill was assigned as a chief narcotics agent to General MacArthur’s administration, Ida continued her artistic career and had work accepted into the 1950 Nitten Exhibition at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Ueno National Art Gallery.

Upon their return to the United States, the Tollengers apparently continued to live a remarkably mobile life, moving among St. Louis, Hawaii, Texas, Chicago, and Virginia during the following fifteen years or so. The cheerful map of “Friends Everywhere” thus seems particularly appropriate: less a conventional travel guide than a playful record of a couple whose lives and friendships stretched across the country. The ephemeral mailer is quite rare and unlisted in WorldCat or other online databases as of September 2026.

Source: AskArt