Postcard From the Past

Jim Kavanagh has written an interesting article for CNN.com, and he deserves to be recognized for it.

It seems that an insurance agent in Ohio received a postcard from Montana in his post office box. According to Kavanagh, "The card said Fran and Polly were enjoying their cross–country train ride and had fed deer somewhere along the way."

But those names weren't familiar to the insurance agent, and the card was addressed to a different name.

Oh, and the card apparently had been mailed in 1962.

Kavanagh explains part of that through process of elimination. The addressee apparently had been editor of a local newspaper in a northeast Ohio community and once held that post office box number. She died in 1988.

"Fran and Polly" also seem to have been identified. Fran was a longtime reporter for another newspaper. She died in 1998. And Polly apparently was a friend and colleague of Fran's. She passed away in 2005.

As Kavanagh writes, mail sometimes gets lost behind machinery or inside a mail bag and is missing for a few years at a time, but it doesn't appear that the postcard was missing for all of the last 47 years. Kavanagh explains that the card apparently was purchased at an antique shop in Michigan.

What happened to the card is anyone's guess, but the most likely scenario is that, somehow, it wound up in the hands of someone who probably sold it with some similar items to an antique dealer.

Kavanagh learned that Fran was somewhat eccentric and collected postcards. She "built her postcard collection in part by mailing cards to friends while traveling and then asking for them back when she returned," Kavanagh wrote.

The discovery that the card never reached its destination may have been a disappointment to her. It may have forever been the missing link in her postcard collection chronicling her cross–country train trip in 1962.

But in 2009, it's a connection to people who no longer exist in an America from another century.