Box 28, Arenas Valley, NM — A tiny country post office played a big role in my youth (Part 2)

Olga Harper resigns & Joe Moore becomes postmaster

After five years, Mrs. Harper closed the store and ended her postal career. Arenas Valley resident Joe Moore was named postmaster, and the post office was relocated just one lot to the east, on Joe’s property, in a building near his home on the south side of Arenas Valley Road, approximately in the middle of the “built-up” area; we kids used to catch the school bus for Silver City across the road from the post office.

The second incarnation of the U.S. Post Office at Arenas Valley (the white building on the horizon at the centre of the photograph) was on the property of the new postmaster, Joe Moore. ~ Bea Ingraham Photo

Briefly, before it undertook its role as a post office, it was a small “convenience store” where my friends and I could buy pop and other snacks. It was a nondescript, stuccoed structure of indeterminate age and heritage. As a post office, Its ornate mail boxes and wicket and a few “Wanted” posters announced that it was an institution of the federal government.

The Arenas Valley Post Office as it looked in 1982, not quite as I remember it. I don’t recall the apparent addition, visible at the left and right of the main building, or the TV antenna. If anyone had ever lived there, it must have predated my family’s arrival by years. The “addition” probably served as office space for the postmaster. ~ *Photo by John S. Gallagher, courtesy of the National Postmark Museum of the Post Mark Collectors Club, Bellevue, Ohio.

Joe and Hazel Moore

I remember Postmaster Joe Moore as a tall, gaunt man, seemingly uneasy, but quiet in a friendly sort of way. He never looked well and indeed was notwell: he was suffering from tuberculosis and died on October 23, 1952. His wife, Hazel V. Moore, succeeded him as Arenas Valley Postmaster on June 3, 1953.

Hazel was a thin slip of a woman with dark-blonde hair, the mother of three waif-like little kids, Jimmy, Charlie, and Suzy. She always seemed tired, and often sad, but she was a kind woman who who patiently endured our unlimited curiosity about the larger world that she represented. We respected her and felt so comfortable in her presence that we easily called her “Hazel”.

My friends and I assumed that Hazel took special interest in all our activities. Danny Sanders and I once proudly went to the post office to show her our latest acquisition, gathered in our endless hunt for zoological specimens who might but never did become pets. The creature that we wanted to show Hazel was very large, rather angry bullsnake. Hazel’s response shocked us, and probably the snake, too: She screamed. It was no girlish “Eek!” — it was a full-throated, adrenalin-charged scream. Danny and I retreated, alarmed that our invasion of the post office might have killed Hazel.

Hazel’s daughter, Suzy, told me in an email several years ago that Hazel, who died in 1985, served for 33 years as Arenas Valley’s postmaster. By that time, the post office had been moved out to Highway 180, and soon after that the ugly old building that had served as the Arenas Valley Post Office was demolished and replaced by a double-wide trailer

When I in eighth grade, I wrote a descriptive paragraph about the Arenas Valley post office for my English teacher, Miss Inez Rhodes. My wife, Susan, recently re-discovered the paragraph in an old scrapbook; coincidentally, it is dated October 4, 1956, her 11th birthday.

I don’t recall whether I wrote it in class or as a homework assignment. I received an “A” for content and an A- for “mechanics” — spelling, grammar, punctuation, and layout, and I suppose penmanship. My handwriting was the worst in my class. If you wish, you can try to read the original in a larger image, but the following transcription will be kinder to your eyes:

Box 28

My family’s mailbox, Box 28, was one of several cubbyholes to the left of the ornate wicket, featuring decorative, cast-metal doors with two-factor alphabetic combination locks. We unlocked it by twisting the pointer a full revolution or more clockwise to N, then counter-clockwise to C. It was simplest password in history! Once, when Hazel was absent, I opened Box 28 and reached all the way in and felt around to see if I could get mail out of other, nearby boxes. I could! Easily! I didn’t take a thing, of course! I was no thief, except in fantasy. The image at the right is similar to the Arenas Valley Post Office’s letter boxes.

Stamps at the wicket

I joined the Boy Scouts in the early 1950s, about the same time that some new friends, sons of one of my dad’s business friends, introduced me to stamp collecting. As a result, I became a regular customer at the post office, anxiously anticipating the release of new commemorative stamps and hoping to earn a stamp collecting merit badge (which I did).

Hazel played her role perfectly. From behind her wicket, she would show me new issues that she had received and would sort through sheets of stamps to search for perfectly centred stamps. Hazel, unlike the great majority of today’s so-called “postal clerks,” actually understood what collectors wanted and was always careful to separated stamps from their sheets with surgical precision. I usually bought single stamps for my Ambassador Album For Stamps Of The World and plate blocks of four, which I stored in small stockbook with pages consisting of glassine pockets.

Stamps I purchased in Arenas Valley, starting in 1952 when I was only nine years old.

Stamps on approval

As a Boy Scout, I received the monthly mailing of Boys’ Life magazine. When each new issue arrived, at first I skipped the articles and went straight to the classifieds where there was always a full page of ads, and sometimes more, for stamps on approval.

A Garcelon Stamp Company classified ad from Boys’ Life magazine.

Most of my small allowance — 75 cents a week — went for approvals from such companies as Jamestown Stamp Company, H.E. Harris, Garcelon Stamp Company, and Kenmore. They mailed their clients inexpensive stamps, often in short sets without the high-value issues, packaged in printed glassine envelopes or attached to sheets with stamp hinges. The collector selected the stamps he or she wanted, and returned the remainder along with payment. It was an honour system, one that most collectors upheld (although I must confess that I, as a youthful collector, was not always prompt at making my returns). But I always eagerly awaited the day’s mail to see if it might contain a new selection of approvals.

A sheet of stamps sent on approval by the Garcelon Stamp Company.

The approval sheet at the left came from the well-known Garcelon Stamp Company. The approval sheet indicates that Garcelon was located in Calais, Maine, but that apparently was only a mailing address. Garcelon’s place of business was in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, just across the St. Croix River from Calais. Such approvals normally included only common stamps.

I had always been nuts about airplanes, perhaps because my dad was himself an airplane nut and had done a bit of barnstorming in his youth. It’s not surprising that one of the most exciting set of stamps I obtained not long after I started collecting was a Hungarian airmail issue, eight large stamps in squares and diamonds featuring both real and model airplanes as well as a parachutist. It was issued in 1954, and must have been hot off the press when I purchased it.

My collection also includes a treasured picture postcard which I mailed to my parents from Camp Tuff Moses Boy Scout Camp, several miles north of Silver City. Although it was postcard was cancelled in Silver City, on June 5, 1954, it reached my parents through the Arenas Valley Post Office:

My message to my parents was brief, and hardly indicative of the journalist / teacher / pretty-good speller I would become:

Dear Mom & Dad I have been having a wonderful time. Sunday nite we had a counsul fire. There are several snakes here Ernest [and] I have caught 3 of them. Much Love Robert

Arenas Valley today is a sad little bedroom community, too many of whose residents neglect the virtues of fresh paint, pulling weeds, and preventing their properties from becoming junk yards. The lush orchards and neatly kept homes and gardens of my childhood have largely vanished, and roads and house trailers and “ranchettes” sprawl across the arid valleys and hills where I often hiked for hours and never saw another soul, except for the occasional appearance of the pitiful, elderly woman who owned a small ranch that adjoined our property and suffered, apparently, from schizophrenia. But that’s another story….

The Arenas Valley Post Office is no more. The U.S. Postal Service shut it down in 1987 at the age of 39. A few hears earlier, it had been relocated from to Highway 180 about two miles (3.2 km) from Santa Clara. We true “Arenas Valleyites” never considered the families who lived along the highway to be anything but outsiders. And there is something else that is, apparently, no more — that’s Whiskey Creek in flood.

Where’s the flood?!

Google’s Street View is a great tool for “going home,” in case you, like me, left home at a young age and never returned except for visits, and your last visit was years ago. Recently I decided to take a look at Whiskey Creek the arroyo. And as they say, you can’t ever go home again.

Whiskey Creek (the arroyo) has changed. Over the years, what used to be that broad “avenue” of sand that I mentioned earlier in this web page, has vanished, leaving behind a thin, sandy shadow of itself, mostly overgrown with weeds and brush. Large cottonwood trees that grew on the north bank of Whiskey Creek are still there, including one that my friends and I used to climb on a regular basis. I wouldn’t dare to climb it now, not that I could, because it’s a lifeless, leafless, brittle skeleton of a tree, and must soon fall down to decay and join its old, lifeless roots. Neverless, looking at this image I can almost here the voices of my friends and me coming from high in its branches.

Whiskey Creek where it crosses Arenas Valley Road. In the 1950s, there was no culvert, and the road dropped into what we called a “dip” where the flood waters crossed the road, making it impossible — or very foolish — for drivers to continue their trips until the water subsided. My friends and I often climbed the dead cottonwood tree furthest from the road.

But there’s a mystery here. Why would Whiskey Creek devolve, in just 60 years, into a mere shadow of its former, formidable self? The bed of the arroyo is now a tiny fraction of its width in the 1950s. Here are some possibilities:

• Has the climate change / climate crisis / climate catastrophe dried out the American Southwest to the extent that that Whiskey Creek rarely flows with water, and that desert grasses and shrubs have slowly narrowed it almost to extinction?

• Has suburban sprawl resulted in attempts to divert and contain runoff from the Piños Altos Range? Many homes, roads, and streets have been built in the area north of Arenas Valley, where in the 1950s there was just one dirt road and one house about a mile north of my family’s house.

• Throughout most of the 20th Century, intense efforts by the U.S Forest Service to extinguish forest fires left healthy parts of the forest to do their forest thing, which was to drop needles, leaves, cones, branches, and birds’ nests onto the forest floor, slowly building up the deep layers of decaying vegetation and animal matter called duff, which itself becomes home to innumerable invertebrate critters such earthworms, spiders, insects, all of whom of course die and add their bodies to the mix. The thick, mattress-like layer of duff is good when it comes to is nature’s sponge, soaking up rain and preventing runoff. In conditions of drought, the duff becomes powder dry and in effect becomes a incendiary bomb ready for ignition by a bolt of lighting, a random spark generated by human activity. That ignition can start with a barely noticeable smouldering. Under especially hot, dry conditions, however, a bolt of lightning or even a single spark can instantly turn bone-dry duff into an incendiary that can may quickly “blow-up” in a new “megafires” that will be the lead story on the evening news.

It seems that Whiskey Creek (and Rio de Arenas) are bellwether warning us humans that we tamper with nature at our peril. In recent decades, megafires have burned huge swathes of the Gila National Forest, including large areas of the Piños Altos Range. We have seen how the megafires burn so hot that they destroy not only the forest above ground but sterilize the ground itself, creating ideal conditions for severe erosion and floods. Given the increasingly destructive storms that are impacting countries around the world, it’s anyone’s guess when Whiskey Creek (and Rio de Arenas) might carry floodwaters of unprecedented volume that could destroy much of Arenas Valley and the areas north and south of both of the Arenas Valley Road and Highway 180.

If Postmaster Harper had she known that Whiskey Creek’s and possibly Rio de Arenas’s history of violent floods carried warnings for the future, she might have decided to move her family to a safer location and the our address “Box 28, Arenas Valley, New Mexico” might never have existed.