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 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 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

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 there was a chocolate-flavoured soda pop; I don’t recall the brand, and I never saw it again after that store closed; my friends, who probably bought Coka-Cola or Nehi orange spop or Dad’s Root Beer, thought I was crazy to buy chocolate pop. They just didn’t know what they were missing!

The convenience store’s transition to post office was made visible 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 or her 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 boxes. A few “Wanted” posters announced that post office was an institution of the federal government. I am unaware that any of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted were arrested in Arenas Valley.

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. It looks as if it might have been someone’s home art one time, but if that was the case their tenancy there must have predated my family’s arrival by years. The “addition” may have served as office space for the postmaster, although such a small post office couldn’t have need much office space. ~ 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 not well: 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

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

My family’s mailbox, Box 28, was one of several cubbyholes or mail cubbies 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 — I was no thief, except in fantasy.

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 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 and 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

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 Mrs. Peeler, the pitiful, elderly woman who owned a small ranch that adjoined our property and suffered, apparently, from severe mental illness. 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 its a new location on 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.

Because Arenas Valley was such a small community, and because its post office existed for only just 38 years, collectors are lucky to find covers and postcards cancelled there, and the covers tend to be philatelic (created by or for collectors). The postcard and the cover shown below, both postmarked in Arenas Valley are, or at least seem to be, examples of such philatelic mail. The cover appears to be a first-day cover (an FDC)¹ but isn’t. The cancellations are known as CDSs — circle-date stamps — for obvious reasons. They include not only the name of the post office, but the date (and sometimes the time) of mailing. CDS cancellations are rarely used in these days of automated mail handling.

This cover would be a first-day cover if it had been postmarked on the day the stamp was issued, January 3, 1962, the 50th anniversary of New Mexico’s statehood. However, it was postmarked on February 9 of that year, which makes it just an ordinary cover despite the artistic cachet printed on its left side. ~ Bob Ingraham Collection

The postcard shown below was probably sent to the Arenas Valley postmaster, who would have been Olga Harper, with a request for it to be returned with an Arenas Valley postmark. The collecting of postmarks is known as marcophilately, and collectors of postmarks are marcophilatelists. Yes, I would allow my daughter, if I had one, to marry a marcophilatelist.

This postcard was probably sent under cover (i.e. in an envelope) by Miss Marie Young of Franklin, Indiana, to the Arenas Valley postmaster at the time, Olga Harper, to be favour cancelled and posted back to her. The handstamp was probably applied by a stamp dealer who eventually purchased and re-sold it. ~ Bob Ingraham Collection