Gary Katen got the big surprise of his life when a letter sent almost ago arrived in his mailbox in Hackensack (NJ) years and, to add irony, it was not international, but came from California. And a few weeks later another one came from 1946.
The address was correct, but obviously the letter was not it was addressed to him or anyone he knows. So no one receives them as expected, in practice.
“I open the mailbox and I receive this (first) letter and I say, okay, first of all, it’s not me… Then I look closely and it’s dated May 4, 1946, it’s the postmark… It makes years!” Katen told Fox News.
Two one-cent stamps and six-cent postage of airmail cost still They were glued to the envelope. The letter was sent when World War II was barely over, Harry Truman was in the White House and the Marx Brothers were dominating the big screen. years I said, okay, so it has to be a friend of mine who is making fun of me because I have been complaining about not getting my mail. But it is a real letter.”
Her curiosity about him grew when he received a second letter a few weeks later. He eventually opened both and although the handwriting is a little hard to read, it appears to be a correspondence between a husband and his in-laws in New Jersey, describing a trip he was taking with his wife in California.
“We would love to meet the people it was addressed to because they all sound like a big family and tell them: ‘we got your mail’” .
Anxious to return the letters to their rightful owners or their descendants, Katen became an amateur detective. He first checked with the post office in Hackensack and then checked property records, a complicated search after learning of a fire in town that may have destroyed some documents.
FOX News asked the United States Postal Service (USPS) how letters could take more than seven decades to get to the right place. Spokesman Xavier Hernandez responded in a statement: “What we typically find is that someone finds old pieces of mail, like these, and then deposits them in one of our collection boxes. Old letters and postcards can also be purchased at flea markets, antique stores, and even online, and then re-entered into the system. In most cases, these incidents do not involve mail that has been lost on the network and then found.”
Katen disagrees with that explanation. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not quite sure I believe that,” she stated. For now, he remains hopeful that one day he can finally connect the family linked to the letters that arrived at his door.