RETURNED TO SENDER
Letter sent by local man to a client in Pawtucket resurfaces some 35 years later
GLOCESTER — Call it a case of postal déjà vu.
Glocester attorney Bradley L. Steere and his wife, Dorothy, were getting ready to leave his office on Putnam Pike for lunch one day recently when the postman arrived with the day’s mail.
After sifting through the stack of envelopes, one particular envelop stood out.
It was sent first-class and addressed to Bradley Steere with a postmark from a post office in Baltimore, Md. Attached was a form letter from the U.S. Postal Service apologizing for the “damage to your mail during handling.” Curious, Steere opened it. What he found inside left him dumbfounded. It was an unopened, undelivered letter Steere had mailed to a client on Feb. 1, 1980. For some reason, the letter never made it to its recipient in Pawtucket and was returned to sender — 35 years later.
“I guess it proves the old saying ‘the mail must go through,’” says Steere, who is still scratching his head over the postal mystery.
Steere says the letter he typed more
than three decades ago was sent to a Pawtucket man he was representing in a boundary dispute. The facts of the dispute are foggy now, but Steere believes it involved a case in which a Foster man had built a driveway that had encroached onto his client’s property in Foster.
Steere says his file on the matter is long gone and that he has no recollection as to the resolution of the dispute.
On Thursday, Steers says the letter was finally delivered.
“As a consequence of receiving this letter, I attempted to contact my long ago client who I found out has long since been deceased, but I did get in tough with his daughter by phone and sent her a copy of everything by letter,” he said.
Steere and his wife say they are still flummoxed by the undelivered letter and the mystery of its whereabouts for the past 35 years.
“It’s the strangest thing that it would be sent back after all of these years,” says Dorothy Steere.
The U. S. Post Office doesn't have an answer, but it's not the first time an undelivered letter has been returned to sender years later or — arrived in the mail after decades.
Chicago Sun-Times
The reported in April 2012 that a postcard mailed in 1958 had finally reached its intended addressee, 71-year-old Scott McMurry. The postcard, originally sent by Scott McMurry's mother, found its way to him with help from social media.
New York Daily News
The reported in November of 2013 that a card mailed July 4, 1943, had at last made its way to the (former) home of sisters Pauline and Theresa Leisenring of Elmira, N.Y.