[TWIAR] QSL card "returned to sender" - 50 years after it was originally sent

[Greg Williams]

Postcard from yesteryear

Undelivered mail from 1956 comes back to DeLand

By CHRISTINE GIRARDIN
Staff Writer DELAND -- It's been a long, mysterious journey for one 
little postcard.

In 1956, George Hitz dropped a postcard into his Stetson Avenue mailbox, 
hoping a fellow HAM radio operator in Riverside, Calif., would soon get 
it. No one knows whether the postcard completed its cross-country 
journey, but it was returned to its starting place this week bearing a 
1956 DeLand postmark and a "return to sender" stamp.


Hitz, 64, doesn't even remember mailing the 3-by-5 inch card emblazoned 
with his call sign. The cards are an integral part of HAM radio 
tradition, sent almost automatically to confirm radio contacts made 
around the world.

The postcard's reappearance, however, is something Mack McCormick, 59, 
won't soon forget. He now lives at the Stetson Avenue home where the 
card was sent in 1956. On Monday, he pulled it from his mailbox.

"The card apparently has been in the twilight zone for 50 years," said 
McCormick, who lives in the home where Hitz spent his teenage years. 
"It's not wrinkled or anything."

The moment he saw the postcard, McCormick stood utterly confused. His 
wife has only one way to describe it.

"I'd call it dumbstruck," Connie McCormick said. "Talk about snail mail 
-- 50 years' worth."

Mack McCormick quickly recovered and began an Internet hunt to track 
down the postcard's writer.

When they first spoke on the phone, Hitz said he thought McCormick must 
be a telemarketer. Who else would have his name and home phone number in 
Sudbury, Mass.?

"I had to keep asking questions and pull it out of Mack. It wasn't 
obvious to me that he lived in our house," said Hitz, who hasn't seen 
his old Stetson Avenue home since the 1970s.

It's unlikely the postcard has spent the last 50 years hiding in a 
DeLand post office, said Joseph Breckenridge, U.S. Postal Service 
spokesman for Central and North Florida. The local post office hasn't 
been in the same location that long, and maintenance workers would have 
found it long ago if it was trapped in a sorting machine.

However, it is possible the card went all the way to California and was 
rediscovered recently by someone who dropped it back in the mail, 
Breckenridge said.

The postcard, called a QSL card by HAM radio operators, tells part of 
the tale. It includes Hitz's age at the time he mailed it, along with 
information about the radio contact he made in February 1956 with 
someone called Chief Operator Dave. But with no street address for 
"Operator Dave," the card apparently wasn't delivered.

In the early days of HAM radio after World War I, operators were 
required by the Federal Communications Commission to log all their 
contacts. The confirmation cards helped track radio activity when 
scientists were still learning about radio wave behavior, said Hal 
Wallace, curator of electricity collections at the National Museum of 
American History in Washington, D.C.

Today, collecting cards is something of a hobby among HAM radio 
operators. Each card serves as a record of individuals in places as far 
away as Australia. There are about a dozen boxes full of them at the HAM 
radio station operated by volunteers at the National Museum, Wallace said.

Hitz isn't interested in getting his old postcard back. He's been a HAM 
operator since he was 12 years old and already owns thousands of such cards.

Instead, the card is staying with McCormick, who is eager to frame it 
and share the story of how a peculiar piece of history turned up in his 
DeLand mailbox.