One day last week while organizing my mother’s desk my sister came across a box of letters. Calling them letters might be a stretch. These were postcards and notes written to our father by his children from summer camp and during trips with friends.
Gratefully, many of them were preserved by my father’s longtime secretary, Helen Gault.
Aunt Helen, as we called her, put each letter in a small business envelope bearing the logo of “Columbus, Mississippi, The Friendly City” and with her Smith-Corona manual typed the pertinent information: “Letter to Mr. Imes from Tanner, June 1963” or “Written when Birney was at Culver, Summer of 1962.”
Evidently, Aunt Helen filed these away at The Dispatch, otherwise they would have been lost in the 1967 fire that destroyed our home on Chickasaw Drive.
Let me pause here to urge you, dear reader, if you should be so fortunate to have children who send you postcards or letters from afar, by all means hang on to them. They, like savings bonds — another arcane practice you don’t hear much about — will only increase in value over time.
In June of 1965, Andy Brislin, Carl Edwards and myself set out for Alaska in a brown station wagon captained by now-legendary Junior High football coach Warren “Oop” Swoope.”
Our ultimate destination was Petersburg, a fishing village set in a string of islands off the coast of British Columbia. A sister of the mother of Roger and Dean Swartz, two of Oop’s former charges, lived there and had hosted earlier such expeditions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s admonition that life is more about the journey than the destination was never more applicable than on this adventure. We may have stayed in a motel a time or two, but most nights we camped and cooked our meals over a fire.
We motored through the Black Hills of South Dakota where we tipped our hats to Mt. Rushmore; journeyed up the AlCan Highway, then much of it unpaved and brutal on tires; camped near Denali (then Mount McKinley) where we had to fish for our supper; visited Anchorage, the state capital, where Oop wrangled an audience and photo op with the governor and then took a ferry to our destination, a fishing village settled by Norwegians where we pulled fish out of the ocean until our arms ached.
All this recollection was evoked by a modest card postmarked, “Keystone, South Dakota June 8, 1965.” On the front of the card is a doctored photo of two men in a 1950s vintage motor boat pulling a gigantic fish from a lake.
“Dear Dad, Look at the fish. There are millions of ducks up here. We see mostly mallard drakes. Today we saw six antelope in Sand Hills. I tried to get close enough to take a picture but I couldn’t … We’re fixing to chow down. Your son, BI.”
A letter written from Camp DeSoto by sister Tanner reveals a more informative and affectionate correspondent. She begins a letter that contains a dizzying array of activities in the following way:
“Dear Daddy, I am having a good time. We are going to DeSoto Falls Sunday. Will you please send me some color film (size 127).”
No doubt shortly after receipt of said letter, Aunt Helen was dispatched to one of the many downtown drug stores (Gardner and Myers, Alford’s, Shull’s or Laws) for color film.
One has to wonder in this digital age what equivalent will future generations have to these humble, but treasured relics of a distant past.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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