Postcard from 1953 addressed to man's Illinois home reaches him in Idaho 72 years later
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Postcard from 1953 addressed to man's Illinois home reaches him in Idaho 72 years later")
Postcard from 1953 reaches sender at his Idaho home of 30 years 72 years later. Photograph: (Representative image)
The postcard sent in 1953 reached the man's Illinois home recently. However, he was no longer living there, and it had been 30 years since he was in Idaho. The post master sought help and located the sender in Idaho.
Alan Ball sent a postcard home in Illinois from the United Nations during a trip in 1953 as a 16-year-old. The letter was only recently delivered to his home, 72 years later, the New York Times reported. Ball was on his way to Puerto Rico to spend the summer with his aunt. He first took a train to New York, where he visited the UN headquarters. There, he got a postcard and paid 2 cents as postage “We are now in the U.N. bldg. — extremely modern throughout,” he wrote in the postcard. However, the postcard never reached his home in Ottawa, Illinois. But now he has finally received the letter, not in Illinois, but in Idaho, where he has been living for 30 years. Ball was shocked when a letter carrier handed him the postcard in Sandpoint, his current home. The 88-year-old told NYT that he had "totally forgotten" about it. Also Read: Forget introvert or extrovert — are you secretly an overlooked personality type called ‘otrovert’?
Ball is now a retired emergency room doctor, and told the publication, “That 2 cents did a lot of work." “It has mostly brought a chuckle to me because, you know, who gets their mail returned after 72 years?” The letter was addressed to Rev. F.E. Ball, Mr. Ball’s father, and his family. It carries the date June 17, 1953, and has a UN-branded stamp. Postal officials told The Shaw Local, a newspaper in Illinois, that the letter remained lost at the UN and was only posted recently. After it surfaced at the Ottawa Post Office in Illinois, the town’s postmaster reached out to genealogists for help. “They did some sleuthing and found out I was here in north Idaho, and the next thing I knew, I was getting a call from a reporter back there,” Ball told NYT.
After he received the postcard, Ball became a celebrity in the small town, and his story appeared in The Bonner County Daily Bee, a local newspaper. Ball doesn't remember a lot about his trip to New York, and now this postcard is helping him relive the vague memories.
