OBERLIN, Kan. – Talk about a snail’s pace.
A postcard featuring a colour drawing of Santa Claus and a young girl took almost a century to reach its destination.
The card, mailed in 1914, just arrived in northwest Kansas.
The Christmas card was dated Dec. 23, 1914, and mailed to Ethel Martin of Oberlin, Kansas, apparently from her cousins in Alma, Nebraska.
Oberlin postmaster Steve Schultz says it’s a mystery where the card spent most of the last century.
He says: “It’s surprising that it never got thrown away.”
Ethel Martin is deceased, but Schultz says the post office wanted a relative to have the card.
That’s how it ended up with Bernice Martin, Ethel’s sister-in-law.
She says the 93-year-old card was apparently 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, since the one-cent postage of the early 20th century wouldn’t have covered it.
“We don’t know much about it,” said Martin. “But wherever they kept it, it was in perfect shape.”
