Here is a unique postcard showing the lifesaving crew launching the lifeboat, presumably to help a vessel in distress. I have to assume that the launching is taking place at the U.S. Life Saving Station at Gap Head. The postcard is not dated but has a postmark of 1915.

The postcard was published by J. Sidney Poole. Poole was a pharmacist in Rockport at the turn of the century. Still today, there is a plaque on the building where his pharmacy was located, at the corner of Main St. and Beach St., just across the street from where John L. Dickinson’s stable was located a few years earlier. Poole published at least a couple of postcards that I have seen but I don’t know how active he was as a publisher.

In researching Poole online, I found little about him. Given Rockport’s long history as a dry town, there is one interesting footnote about him: In 1901, a judge in Salem Superior Court fined Poole $75 for “maintaining a liquor nuisance.”

This card was printed by the Frank W. Swallow Post Card Co. of Exeter, N.H., a company that was in business from 1904 to 1942.