Winnowing four decades of letters from loyal readers

Quasi-pack rat that I am, by the time the computer and other technological innovations had rendered the handwritten letter obsolete I had amassed enough personal letters from readers over four decades to fill my old Army foot locker and several large cardboard boxes.

If I disclosed who some of the letters were from, you’d likely nominate me for the Name Droppers Hall of Fame, and so I won’t. Suffice to say they are from readers representing all walks of life, from princes to paupers, plutocrats to politicians, including governors and United States senators. But mostly they are from Just Plain Folks such as yourself, and many have led to a continuing pen pal relationship..

They are letters of complaint and commendation; letters suggesting column ideas, and notes of shameless self-promotion; thinly veiled threats of lawsuits; and rantings from certifiable nut cases. They are witty, and dimwitted; happy and sad; thigh-slapping funny and deadly serious. And they are treasured, which is why I’ve hung on to them. But this week, 16 years after stowing the lot in my garage, I began the job of thinning the herd, so to speak.

I suppose there’s no good reason for keeping even the keepers that I am setting aside. I probably should chuck them into the Tri-Community Landfill in neighboring Fort Fairfield, along with those that didn’t make the cut. And I might, were it not for the fact that I know damn well that within hours of doing so I’d desperately need something that was in the collection.

Inspirational things such as the joke Fred Boyce of Bangor included in a perceptive letter about state government’s shortcomings, pre-Christmas 1986, for example: Man asks wife what she wants for Christmas. Wife says a divorce sure would be nice. “I hadn’t planned on spending that much this year,” the man replies. “Every man laughs at that joke, but females don’t,” Boyce told me, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.

From the box marked “1985” came a letter from Mark Armstrong of Greenville, suggesting how one might save money playing the Maine State Lottery. (Do not buy any lottery tickets. Take an old brown paper bag. Scrawl a few sets of six numbers on it, then wait patiently for the Saturday night lottery drawing. Your chances of winning will be roughly the same as if you had bought tickets).

Armstrong invited me to supper if I were ever up his way. “Call us first, so we’ll know not to pull the shades and lock the door when you drive in the yard,” he advised. “We live in the tar paper shack with the satellite dish out back.”

That same year Merle Hetley of Bangor wondered how any kind of repair work undertaken before the invention of the transistor radio could have gotten done. “Quite a few of my neighbors have been getting new siding, new shingles, etc. on their houses lately. Not one member of the work crews is able to drive a single nail without a radio blasting loud enough to chip the china,” he wrote.

He had presumed that such incredible noise was necessary for the job, maybe serving to soften the shingles, or to shrink the plastic siding to fit. “But an architect has assured me that that is not the case. I am sure that home improvements were accomplished in the days B.T. (Before transistors). Whatever did they do? Whistle while they worked?”

In 1986, I got my comeuppance from a Bangor encyclopedia saleslady, whose profession I had slighted. “There is an old saying, ‘The ignorant can’t insult you, and the intelligent won’t,'” she wrote. “So maybe I shouldn’t feel insulted.” Touche, my lady. I think.

The late curmudgeon Frank Penrose Hopkins from up Fort Kent way wrote great letters – acerbic, terse and to the point. “I’m sure you are aware of how silly you people [at the BDN] seem to County people when you refer to Bangor as being in ‘northern Maine,”‘ he wrote 20 years ago. “We know here that the Boston line now extends to Bangor on our south. One reason I live here with my family is for the security of that blessed 200 miles of buffer zone between us nice folks and you yahoos.”

As I hack away at my pile of letters, former yahoo turned nice folk by virtue of being back on the correct side of the Hopkins buffer zone again, I realize I have yet to meet the e-mail that can bring to its recipient the joy of a well-crafted letter, written on paper, preservable for the ages.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.