July 19 (UPI) — A Maine woman was stunned to receive a postcard that turned out to have been sent from Paris, France, in 1969.
Jessica Means, who has lived in her Portland home for 17 years, said she initially thought the postcard in her mailbox Monday must have been delivered to the wrong address.
“At first I thought it must have been meant for one of my neighbors,” she told the Bangor Daily News. “But then I realized it was addressed to the original owners of my house.”
The postcard, bearing the image of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Rene A. Gagnon and signed by someone named Roy.
“Dear folks,” Roy wrote, “By the time you get this I will have long since been home, but it just seems proper to send this from the Tour Eiffel, where I am now. Don’t have a chance to see much but having fun.”
The postcard appears to bear a French postmark from March 15, 1969, but also has a new stamp and a July 12, 2023, postmark from Tallahassee, Fla.
Means said someone also recently wrote “or current resident” after the names of the intended recipients.
Rene Alberia Gagnon, born in Quebec in 1905, died in 1988. His wife, Rose Rachel Gagnon, died at the age of 90 in 2002. Rene Gagnon’s obituary revealed his daughter was married to a man named Roy Salzman, and the couple lived in Belgium in 1988.
Records show other relatives ended up in Florida. Means theorized one of those relatives may have come across the old postcard and decided to put it into the mail.
“I’d really like to say thank you to whoever decided to put a stamp on the postcard and drop it in the mail on July 12,” she said. “I’m sure they knew the intended recipients were long gone and yet they chose to mail it anyway. I just want that person to know that the card not only made it but that that one small, simple gesture made my day.”
