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

Five years after the Arenas Valley Post Office opened, Mrs. Harper closed her home-based convenience store and resigned as postmaster. Arenas Valley resident Joe Moore was named postmaster, and the post office was relocated just one lot to the east on the same side of Arenas Valley Road; we kids used to catch the school bus for Silver City across the road from the post office.

The second incarnation of the at Arenas Valley Post Office (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

The “new” Arenas Valley Post Office was a nondescript, stuccoed structure of indeterminate age and heritage. Before it became a post office, it housed a small convenience store where my friends and I could buy pop and other snacks. One of my favourite purchases was chocolate-flavoured soda pop; I don’t recall the brand, and I never saw it again after that store closed to make room for the post office.

The convenience store’s transition to post office was made public by the addition of a simple sign above the door and the installation of ornate mail boxes and a wicket behind which the postmaster greeted his customers, sold stamps and money orders, and distributed letters and junk mail — very small amounts of junk mail compared to today’s flood! — to the mail cubbies. A few “WANTED” posters announced that post office was an institution of the federal government.

The Arenas Valley Post Office as it looked in 1982, not quite as I remember it — in my recollection it was just one room with a divider and a wicket separating customers from the post office’s inner sanctum. This photo shows that it might actually have begun as someone's home. ~ 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, uneasy man, but quiet in a friendly sort of way. He and his family lived in a small house behind the post office. Joe never looked well and indeed was not well: he was suffering from tuberculosis and died October 23, 1952. His wife, Hazel V. Moore, succeeded him as Arenas Valley Postmaster on June 3, 1953. I have no idea who served as interim postmaster before Hazel took his place.

Hazel, a thin slip of a woman with dishwater-blonde hair, was mother to three waif-like little kids, Jimmy, Charlie, and Suzy. Hazel always seemed tired and sad, but she was a kind woman who patiently endured the limitless curiosity of my friends and me 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 entered the post office to show her our latest prize, captured in our endless hunt for animals which might have become pets but never seemed to like the idea. The hapless creature that we wanted to introduce to Hazel was a large, angry bullsnake. Hazel’s response shocked us, and probably the snake, too: She screamed a full-throated, adrenalin-charged, phobic, death-defying scream. Danny and I retreated with our snake, 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, about two miles from Central, whose name was changed to Santa Clara in 1996. Soon after the move, the ugly old building that had was demolished and replaced by a double-wide trailer.

In eighth grade at the Elementary Laboratory School, operated for the benefit of student teachers at New Mexico Western College (now WNMU, the University of Western New Mexico), I wrote a descriptive paragraph about the Arenas Valley Post Office for my 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.

Miss Rhodes awarded me with I an “A” for content and an A- for “mechanics” — spelling, grammar, punctuation, layout, and I suppose, my barely readable penmanship. If you wish, you may try to read the original in a larger image, but the following transcription will be kinder to your eyes:

Box 28

TheseCor post office mailboxes, known as mail cubbies, are similar to the ones used in the Arenas Valley post office. ~ Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Box 28, my family’s mailbox, was one of several cubbyholes or mail cubbies to the left of the post office’s ornate wicket, featuring decorative, cast-metal doors with two-factor alphabetic combination locks. We unlocked it by twisting its single pointer a full revolution or more clockwise to N, then counter-clockwise to C. Oh to still have such simple passwords! Once, when Hazel was absent, I opened box 28 and reached all the way in and felt around to see if I could pull mail out of other, nearby boxes. I could! Easily! I didn’t take a thing. I didn’t even look at my potential “loot” — I was no thief, except in fantasy.

Stamps at the wicket

A Boy Scouts of America stamp collecting merit badge, the most coveted of the few that I earned. The one I have now is not the one I earned, but the design has not changed. Bob Ingrahan Collection

I joined the Boy Scouts of America in the early 1950s, about the same time that two boys about my age, sons of one of my dad’s business associates, introduced me to stamp collecting. I soon became a regular customer at the post office, anxiously anticipating the release of new 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 and would sort through panes of stamps to search for perfectly centred copies. Hazel, unlike most of today’s so-called “postal clerks,” actually understood what collectors wanted and always 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 Boys’ Life magazine, now called Scout Life. When each new issue arrived, I skipped the articles and other advertising, and went straight to the classifieds where there was always a full page and sometimes more of classified ads for stamps on approval.

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

I spent most of my allowance — 50 cents a week — on approvals from such companies as Jamestown Stamp Company, H.E. Harris, Garcelon Stamp Company, Kenmore, and Gadsden Stamp Company.¹ The Gadsden company, I soon learned was “headquartered” in a bunagalow just a block or two away from my grandparents’ almost identical bungalow in Hurley, a company town owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation, and that its owner was also the president of the Hurley Stamp Club.

The business model for approvals was based on trust. The approval dealers mailed inexpensive stamps to their clients, usually in short sets without the high-value stamps, 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 was not always prompt at making my returns.

A sheet of stamps sent on approval by the Garcelon Stamp Company. ~ Bob Ingraham Collection

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

Not long after I started collecting stamps, I realized that some stamps reflected my most memorable experience to that time, namely my first airplane ride. Shortly before my family moved to New Mexico, my Dad arranged for Helen and me to have a flight in a Piper Cub over Savona. I have been nuts about airplanes ever since that day, so it’s not surprising that one of the most exciting selections of approvals I received included a set of eight Hungarian airmail stamps, issued in 1954, picturing ring and model airplanes as well as a parachutist. When I saw that the set included a stamp two MiG-15s flying in formation, I couldn’t not purchase it.

My family often went to movies at the Gila Theatre in Silver City, where I had been mesmerized by newsreel footage of dogfights between communist MiGs and American F-86 Sabrejets during the Korean War. That set of Hungarian stamps must have been hot off the press when I purchased it. I learned many years later that the average Hungarian never saw those stamps, which were produced mainly to sell to foreign collectors as a means of raising foreign currency, which meant that few of those stamps were used as postage. Almost half a century later, in 2001, I was pleased to find a rare postally used copy of the MiG-15 stamp in a Vancouver stamp shop.

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 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 a promise of the journalist and English teacher 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

Not long after 1957, when my family moved from Arenas Valley to Silver City, and I started high school, stamp collecting faded into the background of my life, replaced by a growing interest in girls, photography, girls, some of my classes (band, science, geometry, journalism), and girls. Military service in Vietnam, university, marriage, husbandhood, fatherhood, and my career as a teacher put more and more distance between me and stamp collecting until 1980 or 1981, when teachers in my elementary school were “encouraged” — coerced? — into sponsoring extracurricular activities.

By your pupils you’ll be taught

I am not a religious person, but the simple beauty of this Ireland stamp re-ignited my interest in philately. Soon I was soon searching for other attractive Ireland stamps, and learning a lot about Irish history. ~ Bob Ingraham Collection

The last thing I wanted to do was to sponsor a basketball or other sports team. Then I had an idea: I would start a stamp club! It turned out to be an idea that would change my life and, I hope, the lives of the students who joined the club.

I soon had a room full of enthusiastic new collectors who seemed to have found their niche: They were quiet, thoughtful, academically inclined, more introverts than extroverts, and quick to learn that stamps aren’t just colourful little rectangles of paper, but documents — historical artifacts — that reveal much about the world that they had yet to experience.

In his lyrics for the Broadway musical The King and I, and the subsequent movie of the same name, lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II wrote these words: “'If you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught.” Stamp collectors need stamps, and I bought a large box of loose, worldwide stamps for the club members to search through. But they weren’t alone. I was soon right in there with them, sorting through piles of stamps, helping them find stamps for their own collections; if a student wanted stamps showing birds, or red stamps, or Canadian stamps, I’d help look for them. And then I found a stamp that I wanted.

It wasn’t long before a local stamp dealer introduced me to cover collecting. Covers — “dirty, old, used envelopes” — offer what stamps alone cannot: Every collectible cover has a story to tell. Its stamps or lack of stamps tells the collector how it was carried through the mail stream and what it might have enclosed. Hand-written or typed addresses and return addresses reveal the origins, destination, and intended recipient or recipients. Their cancellations and postmarks, penciled notations, paper type, size and condition of envelope, general condition, and sometimes — if you’re lucky — the contents all work together to provide detailed if incomplete histories of covers.

Covers (used envelopes) are far superior to individual postage stamps when it comes to story telling. This cover is an artifact of the Vietnam War, posted on the opening day of Operation Utah in which the U.S. Marine Corps experienced its bloodiest combat to that date in the war. I was a hospital corpsman serving with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division, writing to my parents in Silver City.

The airmail cover shown above is stuffed full of data that helps to identify it. The return address tells the collector (me!) that I was at an undisclosed location (not San Francisco!) and that I was serving in the U.S. Navy as a hospital corpsman who had been shanghied by the U.S. Marine Corps. The address shows that the cover was being sent to my parents, although without additional information another collector could only assume that the sender and the recipients were related. The word “FREE,” written in pen where a postage stamp would normally be shown, is evidence that I was in a combat zone when it was posted, which meant that I didn’t have to use a stamp. My battalion was in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam. The date of posting, shown in the somewhat blurry CDS cancellation, is March 4, 1966. A Google search using the keywords Marine Corps, 3rd Battalion, and March 4, 1966 will quickly bring up the fact that Operation Utah against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops began that day. Deeper research will eventually show that 100 Marines were killed in that day and the next, and that I was seriously wounded in combat on March 5.