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A BOOMING MARKET Yellowstone memorabilia show moving to Billings By MICHAEL MILSTEIN Gazette Wyoming Bureau For many visitors to Yellowstone National Park through the years, memories were not enough. They collected postcards, souvenirs and other keepsakes to remember their trips through the fantastic preserve known for its geysers, scenery and wildlife.
 Gazette photo/JAMES WOODCOCK Dan Huff's quarterly antique show and sale will now include a postcard and paper show focusing on Yellowstone Park. A growing market in such old-time park mementos led collector Tom Mulvaney to begin an annual show and sale of park postcards and other memorabilia in Helena about 10 years ago. Some five years later, antique dealers Jack and Susan Davis took over the show and moved it to Bozeman, where it grew into what is probably the largest annual assemblage of privately owned national park collectibles in the country.
"I'm happy to see it in the state - the closer it is to Yellowstone, the better it will be for the collectors," said Michael Francis of Billings, a wildlife photographer and longtime collector of Yellowstone postcards. Show promoter Dan Huff said he expects the inventories of about 15 exhibitors from around the region to draw national park keepsake collectors from across the country. Collectors from as far away as New York and New Jersey have already called him to say they plan to attend. "Anything that says Yellowstone Park or Glacier Park - this is the place to look for it," Huff said. "It's also growing beyond Yellowstone. We'll have things from Grand Canyon, the Tetons and Yosemite, too." A public fascination with wild places and increased access to collectibles fostered by Internet auction sites such as eBay have fueled a booming market for antique national park memorabilia. Some rare Yellowstone postcards that might have cost 50 cents 10 years ago today might sell for $35 - although many still hover in the $1 to $2 price range, Francis said. "I think it's becoming a bigger and bigger market all the time," he said. Mulvaney, a park postcard collector in Helena, first launched the park show as a meeting place for collectors from around the region. Once it took off, he handed it over to the Davises, who own an antique store in Bozeman and built the show into a larger, mid-May event in Bozeman that attracted more and more park buffs on their way to and from Yellowstone. "They're well-known as the leading authorities on Yellowstone Park collectibles," Huff said. "Some of their collection was featured in Life magazine two years ago, and they've been on two television collectible shows. Jack and Susan took the national parks theme and applied it to a paper collectibles show - and the idea really took off. Their show just got better every year." But following last year's show in Bozeman, the Davis' decided they could no longer afford the time it took to organize the annual production. There was talk of the show moving out of the state to Salt Lake City, but then Mulvaney and Francis suggested to Huff that he take it over. Since he was interested in expanding the breadth of his quarterly antique show in Billings, he jumped at the chance. "I'm going to try to continue it on an even broader scale," Huff said. He would like to attract more items from national parks other than Yellowstone, helping to further establish the show as the place to shop for park mementos. But Yellowstone will probably always remain the center of attention. "Yellowstone Park has always been the most popular park in our part of the world," Huff said. "And Yellowstone collectors are the biggest group by far when it comes to national park material." Postcards will likely dominate the show, offering rare glimpses of a now-vanished Yellowstone where visitors once fed bears along roadsides and watched gleefully as hot springs laundered their handkerchiefs. But Huff also expects dealers to bring many rare books and maps, plus the colorful ashtrays, pennants and other keepsakes that many families brought home to commemorate their summer visits to the first national park. "It's really an enjoyable event and if anybody's going to be able to carry it on, it'll be the Huffs," Mulvaney said. "They've got a great foundation already."
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