3 cent stamps . . . and other relics

     In our high school years, Belton lived fifteen miles away.  By today's measures, it may as well have been fifteen-hundred.  Remember . . .  no iPhones, no FaceTime or texting,  nor any other gizmo's.  Well, perhaps Dick Tracy's wrist radio.  (Who was Dick Tracy?  Go ask 'an old  person' about that comic strip  detective.).  A three minute telephone call between our towns cost 25 cents.  Although gasoline cost but 25 cents per gallon, few high school students had ready access to an automobile (at least in our socio-economic cohort). So, if we wanted to 'communicate' more often than the occasional face-to-face visit, we resorted to writing letters.
  
    A few years ago, I came across some of Belton's letters in my 'archives' a few days before he was to come to lead worship service in a near-by church.  Doubting that he would recognize me across fifty or so years, I identified myself and gave him the bundle of letters.  In his opening comments to the congregation, he mentioned our brief conversation and the letters.  The shocker, he indicated, was that they all bore THREE CENT STAMPS.

    I remember the  arrival of mail addressed to oneself as a 'big deal'.  As a high school freshman, I pestered the clerks at our small-town post office to know when the next delivery was arriving because I  expected a letter from my new 'girl friend'.  One day, Mrs. Lane, a somewhat mischievous sort, wrote on the outside of a newly arrived letter: "Censored by Clerk Lane".  The small post office at my undergrad college was swarmed when the mail was boxed.  Although my brief military service was all within the U.S., it is difficult to describe the scene at 'Mailcall' when the First Sergeant called the names . . . slowly, one by one . . . of the day's recipients.

    As an academic historian 'in an earlier life', I relied heavily on preserved letters for much of my research such as my MA thesis on the first President of Wake Forest College.  And there is great poignancy in the letters  home by Civil War soldiers, many of them barely literate.  Such linkage to one's personal past likely will be increasingly transient with our new modes of 'reaching out' to 'touch'.  Just today, I deleted dozens of old, now inconsequential emails. (I can't imagine an historian of the future finding anything significant therein.) 

   For reasons of economic necessity (it was the time of the Great Depression of the  1930's), my parents lived briefly in different locales just prior to my birth.  In going through some family 'treasures' with them in the 1980's, I was surprised when dad literally grabbed a packet of letters, blushed and quickly put them under lock in his office.  I later learned that they were 'love letters' he had written to his wife back in North Carolina.  Reading them after his death provided a greater appreciation for that period of their lives.

     A largely vanishing art form, such communication is now  derisively labeled 'Snail Mail' and the USPS  seems to attempt offsetting revenue losses with increased rates (soon to be 49 cents) and diversified services.

   What, then, is this vestige of other times . . . the personal letter, handwritten or typed ? (My paternal grand-father used an electric typewriter that always seemed to race ahead of his fingers.)  
In part, it is akin to some of the rationale (in the last post) of viewing old photographs, thereby deepening one's perspectives on life, relationships, meaning, history . . .BIG MATTERS . . .  that transcend an amnesia-prone 'right now'.  

      Create a little 'future history' . . . send someone a hand-written
(unless your script, like mine, resembles hieroglyphics; in that case, type it.  Whoops, not many typewriters around now either, are there?) letter.
    Satchel