Art of letter writing becoming thing of past

Malinda Reinke

Jan. 31, 2010 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Sunday, November 16th, '08 Dearest Joe and Liz,

Greetings, pharmacists deux. How are you this wintry evening? The first flakes of the season took flight this afternoon, and snugly feathered cardinals briefly alit upon the schoolhouse birdfeeder I have hanging beyond the bathroom window. Turkeys are already in short supply at the Patteson Drive Kroger, and Thanksgiving seems very much in the air.

I so hope you both like the card. The pilgrim-hatted basset hound that is suspended aloft in apparent olfactory ecstasy is of particular relevance to me, for we had several of the breed in our home as I was growing up, and there is no variety of dog on earth that I love more ...

Joe Bartolo, pharmacy manager at Kroger supermarket on Patteson Drive, read the introduction to a Thanksgiving Day card he and his wife received just over a year ago from coworker David Mapel.

It had arrived by post.

On the front of the card, a dog wearing a pilgrim hat floated toward a freshly baked pie that was sitting on a dessert table. But inside the card -- and continuing onto a separate sheet of paper -- was a letter Mapel had written describing holidays past, intimate thoughts and memories he wanted to share with friends.

Bartolo shook his head in wonder.

"I had not received a handwritten letter from anyone in years," he said.

"You get a birthday card where someone pens out something real quickly. At Christmastime, you'll get a couple of these year-inreview things where people talk about their family. It's not personal at all. They're sending me the same one they're sending every other friend.

"But this is personal."

He turned the card over in his hands. He looked at the picture. He looked at the words, printed with a pen.

"This was something I'd not had happen to me in a long while," Bartolo said. "It's so rare that it almost had an odd feeling about it. Like, wow, who sits down and takes this much time to write something like that?"

It's a legitimate question.

In the age of e-mails, ecards, texting and tweets, The Dominion Post asked its readers: Are there any old-fashioned letter writers left alive?

It seems so.

David Mapel lives. So do Linda Gabb, Okey Simmons and Eileen Hartman. In fact, more than a dozen like-minded souls throughout Monongalia, Preston and Marion counties responded with a "yes." A few even wrote letters to prove it.

They said it's fun. They said it's relaxing. And they said that, most of all, they still write letters because letters come with that personal touch that Joe Bartolo talks about.

"Joe and I work in an extremely public environment," Mapel explained. "So much lateral thinking. You just feel drained at the end of the day.

"For me, every stroke of the pen, every scratch of a pen tip across a piece of paper is a catharsis. It's an outlet. And writing a letter allows time to convey the full extent of what you want to convey to another person."

Mapel, 48, of Morgantown, fell in love with the art of correspondence at 17 when he changed high schools and began writing letters to a classmate with whom he was secretly smitten. Sadly, he said, she never wrote back.

"But that just kind of precipitated within me this compulsion," he said.

These days Mapel writes to friends and family, "probably a dozen, probably more," from across the U.S., Eastern Europe and South America.

But some of his favorite letter receivers live very close by. Bartolo said there's a drawer at Kroger where co-workers keep letters he's written to them. Some are so appreciated they end up on the bulletin board for everyone to enjoy.

Mapel smiled and said he works with kind people.

With a degree in secondary education, he said perhaps he has a natural tendency to try to educate.

"I'm of a reflective temperament," Mapel said. "I want to convey to people I care about the most minute sense of what I see, what I feel, what I've heard, what I've learned. Sometimes I go on and on in the course of a letter, I think to the point of being really boring. But I assume my reader will be forgiving of this kind of excess."

Mapel doesn't just use words in his letters. He often includes illustrations -- simple or sometimes detailed and elaborate. An ardent fan of trains and railroading, he has written several letters to Gov. Joe Manchin suggesting that West Virginia build a commuter railroad system for its citizens in rural areas. He's planning a letter to President Obama on the same subject and is illustrating the envelope in hopes of drawing the attention of an aide.

"Often I fail miserably, but I try my best to create something of beauty when I write," Mapel said.

"It's become such a part of my life that I almost feel a kind of withdrawal if too many days elapse in which I have not written something -- at least a postcard."

Nov. 22, 2007 Dear Mommom,

Wonderful as always to hear from my #1 lady. How is everything in the beautiful Mountaineer state? Thanksgiving? We had no training today. Got to catch up on a little bit of sleep, and got an on-post pass for about 5 hours. I called my woman and the family. They also fed us a pretty good meal, though it wasn't as good as your cooking, obviously ...

I managed to pay off my car and start paying my own insurance. It's about time, that's all I have to say. The road to man-hood, I guess. Well it's lights out. I love you and thanks for your letters!

love,

your favorite soldier

Eileen Hartman, 84, is still writing letters back and

forth with soldiers.

Although lately it's been her grandson with whom she corresponds, it used to be the military men in World War II.

"These are the postmarks and headings from some of the letters," she said, leafing through a scrapbook of mementos and a stack of letters on her dining room table at her home in Kingwood.

Some of the soldiers she knew from home. Others she met on the train the few times she came home from Washington, D.C., where, right after high school, she began working as a secretary for the U.S. Navy.

"When the soldiers left home, we felt so bad," Hartman said. "We stood at the window of the school on the top floor and watched these kids board the train [at Kingwood]. It just made an impression on me that I have never erased.

"We had a classmate. He was 17 years old. He went to the Army. But before he had gone, he'd written in my autograph book. He'd written: 'Up the river, down the lake. Gosh I got the bellyache.' And he signed it Chester Bolyard. He was gunned down immediately when he reached foreign shores. When I heard that, it just crushed me."

So Hartman began writing letters during the war and never stopped. Today she writes to family and friends, old classmates, her grandson Sean.

Letters have always meant a lot to her and she kept some that she treasures most.

"This is the last letter my mother wrote me," Hartman said, selecting from the pile a two-page letter written in cursive and dated Jan. 30, 1952, from Tunnelton.

"Will write a few lines. All are well except me -- Gertie, Dot and Karen are visiting Grace this week. Dot is having some quilting done. I would help them if I felt better. Pop and Darah Poland is to register the voters in Reno district. They go to Kingwood Friday to be sworn in. That will make a few extra dollars ..."

The letter was full of small things -- a note about some hymn books, a joke Arthur Godfrey told on the radio that day. "She died five days after she wrote it," Hartman said.

There were other letters in her keepsake file. One was from a relative who farmed in Tunnelton in the late 1800s.

July 22, 1896

Dear Grandma:

I will write you a short letter this evening. It has rained a great deal this summer, and we had a hard time to get our corn hoed ... We picked ten gallons of blackberries day before yesterday in the fore noon and Pa took them out to town in the afternoon, and sold them ... Reddy's calf is a great big thing. It is past three months old. It is clear red ..."

There are letters from children and grandchildren in Hartman's file. Most talk of visiting Kingwood and eating breakfast with their grandmother.

"There is nothing like the written word," Hartman said.

Tues. 8 p.m.

Hi Puddin

How are you? Fine I hope. Guess you are studying hard. Well don't do it too much, or too long in fact, don't do anything that will change you in any way ... for as you know I love you very much just the way you are and I am very proud of you ...

With all my love

Dad

Linda Gabb, 71, said she used to have boxes of letters and cards she received from family and friends over the years. But when she moved from New Orleans to Morgantown four years ago, she simply had to condense.

Two letters she did keep are ones her father wrote to her when she was in college in the mid-1950s that made her feel safe and loved when she was away from home. Now she writes to her own children and grandchildren. She writes to family and friends.

"I spend a fortune in postage. I wrote four letters today to four of my friends. And if I don't send a letter to them," Gabb said, "I send them a card once a month just to tell them I'm thinking about them.

"My little granddaughter who is 12 asks me all the time, she says, 'Grandmom, tell me again, how is it you are still friends with some of your friends for 60 years?' Kids today don't have that. I'm still friends with some of my friends from grammar school."

Letters contribute so much to a friendship, she said. "I think it's just the difference in a personal touch." They don't have to be long. What's more important is sharing thoughts and emotions. Gabb always writes with a black flair pen.

"They hardly carry stationery anymore, so I'll tell you e x a c t ly what I do? I go to Walmart, and they have these writing tablets. I buy the ones that are light blue and have these beautiful clouds in the background. I buy angel stickers and I put them up in the righthand corner above the date, just to sort of decorate it.

"And if my penmanship does not look exactly the way I want it to, believe it or not, I start over again."

Gabb said that for as long as she can remember, she has written letters. She had pen pals in school. She wrote letters to colleagues from work that she met over the phone.

She said she receives plenty of letters, too, but not as many as she writes.

"It's funny but what people say when I do get a letter is, 'Oh, I'm so sorry I haven't written sooner. I know I'm three letters behind.' When I write them back, I say, 'You don't need to apologize. You write when you have time and you feel like it. So long as you don't care that I might send you three letters to your one. You know how I am, I just love to write letters.'

"People are on the computer and they're on this twittering or tweetering or whatever it is. And they're doing all this messaging and texting.

"And something along the way that is very important has gotten lost," Gabb said.

Hope you're well. I had a Christmas crisis, so I'm only now able to thank you for cards, Christmas and sympathy ... I have a calendar for you, which I will get off this coming week ... I could only get a large one and should have used a smaller one that fits a regular envelope ...

Cold weather today, snow on Christmas Day, and some airports needed to close down for a spell ...

Okey Simmons, 70, a retired postal worker from Daybrook, was reading a letter he just received from his friend Mary Mulligan, from Dublin, Ireland.

He writes to two friends in Ireland, two in Scotland and another in England.

His correspondence with them began when he started doing some research into his family history. He placed an ad in the local newspapers from the towns where he sought information asking if anyone had knowledge of a certain name or area, and people wrote to him.

That's how he found Mary.

He met Jim Aitken of Edinburgh when Aitken, a retired postal worker in Scotland, placed a notice in Simmons' carrier publication seeking someone to write to and help him track postal information. That was in 1999.

"I don't know how [the letter writing] started," Simmons said. "But I remember as a little kid writing letters to my grandmother in Terra Alta. I lived in a little town in Preston County, and I was just old enough where you could read my writing."

Then, in 1959, when Simmons joined the Navy, his letter writing became mandatory.

"My mother was wanting me to write, and they definitely encouraged you to write when you were in the Navy," Simmons said. "Actually, they would do more than encourage you -- they would threaten you if you didn't write home. "I had a couple girls and a friend back home, and of course my mother and my grandmother."

They wrote him back. "When you're overseas, when you've lost ties back home, it makes no difference. It wouldn't have to be a girlfriend's letter."

As a postal worker and letter carrier from about 1976 to 2006, Simmons was in perfect position to notice trends in personal letter writing.

"The letters started dropping off when computers started being used," he said. "You saw fewer and fewer.

"My one Irish friend ... when she had a computer, would send me a note she wanted me to know about right away, just a few lines. But she did not want to write letter-sized e-mails. She wanted to write letters."

If letters themselves are growing extinct, Simmons' letter-writing tool may disappear first. He writes with a cartridge fountain pen. He says he and his pen pals write about "a little bit of everything -- from our families to the weather to the political situation. And we're still doing the history thing. One lady told me I probably know more about Ireland than the Irish do."

Like most lifetime letter writers, Simmons said he does it for the satisfaction.

"Putting thoughts on paper by hand, you get the chance to really and truly say what you think," he said. "You put it down the way you want to. You don't have spell check to remind you you're not spelling it right.

"It just seems a little more

relaxing, it

a lw ay s

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