Hmm. It appears that I might have been off here…
After reading what Jim said, I looked into it a bit more and he’s right. The AZO stamp box on the back of this postcard is the kind that they used from 1914 to about 1918, after that the stamp box looked almost the same up into the 1940s except the symbols in the four corners changed over the years. Additionally, after some more research on American postcards, it appears that white borders on the front popped up in 1915 (an effort to save ink that just caught on as a style) and were popular until 1930. It’s a shame it wasn’t sent through the mail then we could know exactly when it was from!
So it looks like this card more likely dates from the late 1910s or early 1920s than my original guess of the 1930s. I would say lean as far towards the 20s as possible. Even knowing all of this, the woman’s dress still strikes me as odd for a snapshot sort of image from 1918. I would expect something a bit more old-fashioned paired with the man’s overalls and the location of the photo (again, this just strikes me as a rural family and I would bet money that if you find them on a census, they’re farmers). But then again you learn something new every day. In this case, I suppose there is a chance that this young Tom Jones who visited your grandmother in 1945 is indeed the baby in the photo. And if not the baby in the photo, perhaps another child as he bears a resemblance in my opinion to Kate.
I apologize for my first estimate. Apparently these sort of dresses became popular earlier than I thought. Kudos to Jim for catching the corners of the stamp box.
