EDITORIAL Seasonal treasure

The following first appeared as a column in the Dec. 17, 2004 edition of The Citizen: Every reporter has a favourite story and this one’s mine, a fitting tale for the season. During a renovation of the former Penticton post office at the corner of Nanaimo Avenue and Main Street in early December 1991, construction worker Danny Small found a parcel jammed between a brace and the wall of the elevator shaft. On his lunch break, Danny walked down the street and left it for his friend, reporter Dave Duncan. Dave was busy with other things that day so the parcel landed in the lap of the paper’s newest reporter – me. About the size of a paperback, the package was from a Mrs. A. Moerke of Hope to a Mr. and Mrs. Gau of 450 Hansen St. in Penticton. No sign of the Gaus in the phone book. The date stamp was smudged but the stamps were clearly old. I brought the parcel to museum curator Randy Manuel, the walking, talking history book of the South Okanagan. He started looking through old city directories to see if we could track down the Gaus while I hit the library, conveniently located in the same building, to see if I could get a date based on the stamps. After nearly an hour, Randy uncovered a 1950 directory that listed the Gaus as retired. A search through the museum’s funeral records showed Mary Gau died in March 1966 while her husband Peter was buried alongside her in July 1970. Meanwhile, I returned to tell Randy the stamps were issued in 1954. It seems we had a 37-year-old mystery that led to a dead end. Thankfully, Randy wasn’t prepared to give up. He dug up Mary Gau’s obituary from the Penticton Herald archives to see if the couple had children. Sure enough, a daughter, Florentine Sunderman was listed as married and living in Penticton. Randy practically jumped out of his skin with excitement. “She still lives here, I think.” Sure enough, there she was in the phone book, right above the listing for her son Paul, a longtime member of the Herald’s composing room. After informing Paul of our discovery, I called his mom, a sweet lady in her late 70s. Before meeting Florentine the following morning, I phoned the Hope post office, hoping an oldtimer there might remember the sender. There wasn’t, but the employee said there were still people in Hope with the last name of Moerke. I called Lu Moerke of Hope. “Mrs. A. Moerke? Oh, that would be my mother-in-law Amelia,” she said. The return address was the home Lu and her husband bought when they first moved to Hope in 1952. Amelia lived with her son and daughter-in-law for two years before returning to Alberta. She died there in 1960. Florentine opened the parcel slowly. “Oh, my, it’s a Christmas present,” she said, showing me and photographer Rob Mullin the wrapping. On top was a small card featuring Santa’s face. She delicately tore off the paper to reveal a brown leather case featuring a picture of a pretty cowgirl. The leather was so old and brittle that she broke a piece of the clasp trying to open the case. She asked for my help and finally we got inside to find two decks of cards. “They were real card players because there was no TV in those days,” Florentine said about her mom and dad. “They had a lot of friends that would come over to their house to play.” The amused local postmaster loved the story of the lost 37-year-old parcel and hooked me up with the recently retired Len Cook, a postal worker who started his career in 1959, the year before the Penticton post office moved to Winnipeg Street. Len recalled that parcels were taken downstairs for sorting in an old freight elevator with cage doors. He guessed the Gau parcel fell off the cart, slipped through the crack and became stuck. If it had fallen to the bottom of the shaft, it would have been found during routine maintenance of the elevator, he added. I think of Florentine Sunderman each December. In a season of miracles, both she and I experienced a tiny miracle together. I hope your holiday season is also filled with tiny miracles, shiny moments of bliss you’ll always treasure.