Lost mail returned to sender after 52 years

Lost mail returned to sender after 52 years[
Sent when Eisenhower was president, letter provides Cold War-era sales pitch for Del.

Forget the jokes about snail mail. In this case -- in which it took a letter 52 years to make a two-block trip -- a snail would have made better time.

A few weeks ago, Angie Turochy, information secretary with the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, was performing her usual morning task of opening the chamber's mail when she tore open a return mail packet provided by the U.S. Postal Service.

Out popped a 5-by-8-inch envelope the chamber sent Sept. 17, 1953. Inside she found an array of pamphlets and a booklet extolling the business, cultural and recreational glories of Delaware during the Eisenhower era.

"Where could it have been all those years?" Turochy asked.

The envelope and contents were in good condition -- considering it was sent the year Lucille Ball gave birth to Little Ricky on "I Love Lucy."

Judging from the typed letter that accompanied the pamphlets, the chamber sent the material in response to a request from Mrs. C.T. Babington of Silverbrook Gardens in Wilmington. Babington apparently had called the chamber (telephone 4-5347) to find out about Longwood Gardens. That same day, Elinor McNulty of the chamber's statistical and information bureau put some information together and typed out a two-page letter outlining the tours at Winterthur Museum.

"I thought: This is very bizarre," Turochy said. "Why would it come back?"

It's post office protocol, said Ray Daiutolo Sr., regional spokesman for the Postal Service. When a lost letter is found it becomes "live mail" and the post office attempts to deliver it. If the addressee can't be found, the letter is returned to the sender. In this case, the sender was the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, then located at 1112 King St.

"It sounds to me like it was stuck behind some piece of equipment at the post office," Daiutolo said. "It's a very unusual circumstance. Once or twice a year you hear about it happening somewhere in the country. One time, a letter was caught between a gap between the post office boxes."

Normally, the post office delivers or returns the missing letter with an explanation of what happened, Daiutolo said. That didn't happen in the case of the lost chamber letter.

"Two or three times in my career I've had to write a letter explaining how a letter that is 25 years old is found in a crack in the wall," he said.

But regardless of where the letter spent the past five decades, it wound up serving as a kind of time capsule of the First State in the mid-20th century.

"It's a little peek into what Delaware was like in the 1950s," said Jeanne L. Mell, senior vice president of the chamber.

Mell's favorite brochure is the one featuring a beaming Miss Dover 1952 in a one-piece bathing suit.

For collectors of Delaware ephemera, the package contained the kind of material that can keep a reader busy for hours. Where else could you find the dates for the 1953 muskrat and frog hunting seasons?

Of course, for anybody who grew up in Delaware in the 1950s and 1960s, some of the information was standard bragging rights at the time.

"Wilmington is known as the 'Chemical Capital of the World,' for here are located the headquarters and laboratories of large chemical manufacturing interests," reads one pamphlet.

Another "fact sheet" for "use of schools, scholars, tourists and those interested in Delaware" touts the opening of the Delaware Memorial Bridge on Aug. 16, 1951. "Need for the bridge was evidenced through the fact that more than 6,000,000 cars crossed it during the first year of operation, 200 percent over engineer's estimates," the fact sheet reads.

Other material contains black-and-white photos of the Delaware Trust Co. on North Market Street, now the Residences at Rodney Square luxury apartment building. A picture of the Continental American Life Insurance Building on 11th and King streets looks not unlike the building MBNA Corp. built on the site 42 years later.

For Turochy, it's the personal care that McNulty took that is most astounding.

"To see how the receptionist typed out all this information. ... How much time did she have to type that out?" Turochy said. "Today, we just take it off the Internet -- it takes two minutes."