My Cards May Come Late, But 93 Years?

santa-telephone1.jpg
Updated: 12/17/2007

OBERLIN, Kan.

A postcard featuring a color drawing of Santa Claus and a young girl was mailed in 1914, but its journey was slower than Christmas. It just arrived in northwest Kansas.

The Christmas card was dated Dec. 23, 1914, and mailed to Ethel Martin of Oberlin, apparently from her cousins in Alma, Neb.

It’s a mystery where it spent most of the last century, Oberlin Postmaster Steve Schultz said. ”It’s surprising that it never got thrown away,” he said. ”How someone found it, I don’t know.”

Ethel Martin is deceased, but Schultz said the post office wanted to get the card to a relative.

That’s how the 93-year-old relic ended up with Bernice Martin, Ethel’s sister-in-law. She said she believed the card had been found somewhere in Illinois.

”That’s all we know,” she said. ”But it is kind of curious. We’d like to know how it got down there.”

The card was placed inside another envelope with modern postage for the trip to Oberlin — the one-cent postage of the early 20th century wouldn’t have covered it, Martin said.

”We don’t know much about it,” she said. ”But wherever they kept it, it was in perfect shape.”

(Image found by me, not actual postcard)

4 Comments

  1. Erica
    Dec 18, 2007

    That’s crazy! It does make me feel better since I am just starting to work on our cards!

  2. Heidi
    Dec 18, 2007

    I saw this on the news. I wonder where it was stuck for so long? So many of the Christmas cards we got this year were received so soon after Thanksgiving that it made me wonder if I should even put forth the effort by the 15th of December. Gary has a sister living in Australia so I doubt she will get her card anytime soon. Oh well.

  3. Auntie Lauralee
    Dec 18, 2007

    And I have people who complain about their eBay orders not arriving in a day. They oughta read this story.

  4. korby
    Dec 18, 2007

    WOW!
    It is nice that it was kept so nice.
    I just sent mine 2 days ago so watch for them.