Box 28, Arenas Valley, NM — A tiny country post office played a big role in my youth (Part 3)

M.J. Fell posts a letter in Arenas Valley

It could not be more clear: A cover sent to Gulf Oil in Houston by an M.J. Fell was posted in Arenas Valley. The proof is the Arenas Valley duplex cancellation on its 1-cent stamps.

The date of posting, barely visible on the stamp’s duplex cancellation, is January 14, which happens to be my birthday; the year of posting is not visible. The cover is likely a remittance envelope, enclosing a bank draft or personal cheque for gasoline and other Gulf corporation products sold by the dealer, M.J. Fell. ~ Bob Ingraham Collection

Mid-20th Century cancellation hammer ~ Image courtesy of the Postal History Society of Canada

Duplex cancellations consist of two sections, a circle-date stamp (CDS) that includes the name of the post office, its location, and the date and sometimes the time of posting, and a “killer” or series of straight or wavy lines intended to deface the stamp. Ideally, only the killer defaces the stamp while the CDS is imprinted on the envelope so it will be readable. The cancellation on M.J. Fell’s cover is an f-type 4-bar cancellation, used in American post offices from the 1930s into the 1960s.

In the case of M.J. Fell’s cover, Hazel didn’t give the stamp a solid, square whack with her cancellation hammer, with the result that the year was missed. It’s actually unusual for hand-cancelled stamps on or off cover to have fully readable cancellations. I suspect there were two reasons: It must have been physically demanding to cancel many stamps at a time, and those cancellation hammers don’t seem very ergonomic. Besides, in the 1950s, no one but stamp collectors seemed to care whether a CDS cancellation was readable.

Because the Arenas Valley Post Office served a small village, relatively few covers were ever posted there, and few of those have survived. I have only three in my collection, and only one of them is philatelic.¹

The stamps on the cover belong to the Presidential Issue of definitive postage stamps,² generally called the “Prexies” by collectors. They were issued in 1938 and replaced by the Liberty Issue in 1954, so it’s a bit puzzling that the cover to Gulf, mailed in 1957 or later, was franked with 1-cent Prexies. When new series of definitive stamps are issued, the post office doesn’t generally withdraw older stamps from sale. The Arenas Valley Post Office could have had Prexies for sale for several years after they had been replaced by the Liberty Issue, or M.J. Fell might have had a stock of the older stamps on hand. (American postage stamps remain valid for postage whenever they were issued, right back to 1847, although it would be foolish indeed to use many of the earliest issues for postage. A mint copy of the first American postage stamp, picturing Benjamin Franklin, sells today for several thousand dollars, assuming you can find one.)

The 1938–1954 Presidential Issue, or “Prexies”. The Prexies aren’t rare, although printing and perforation varieties can raise prices to amounts thousands of times greater than face value. ~ Bob Ingraham Collection

This pair of 1-cent stamps from the Prexies, one mis-perforated and the other normal, was priced at U.S. $21.00 on eBay when this web page was published. That’s 1,050 times more than the face value of the two stamps, which doesn’t mean that postage stamps are good financial investments. They aren’t.

Pat and Don Fell provide provenance

So who was M.J. Fell? A fellow member of the on-line stamp club StampoRama suggested that a Google search for the surname “Fell” in Silver City might turn up a family member. It did, and I was able to contact Fell’s daughter-in-law, Pat Fell, a semi-retired real estate broker who lives in Silver City, about five miles west of Arenas Valley. Pat told me in an email that M.J. Fell — Marvin John Fell — moved from Texas to Arenas Valley with his wife, Bettye Jean, and sons David, age 6, and Don, age 3, in 1955.

The value of artifacts is always enhanced if their owners can show details of the items’ provenance. Don, who would one day marry Pat, joined her in answering my questions and explaining his family’s history, and a good portion of the cover’s provenance.

Pat and Don explained that after the family’s move to Arenas Valley, Marvin worked for the Kennecott Copper Corporation, which at that time operated the world’s largest open-pit copper mine at Santa Rita and a smelter at Hurley. For a time, he was a brakeman on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF) trains that carried ore between the two.

From the left: A postcard picturing the Kennecott copper mine at Santa Rita, ca. 1950; a photograph of an AT&SF ore train leaving the mine below a tailings dump and alongside a stream poisoned by minerals leaching from the tailings; a photograph of an AT&SF ore train between Santa Rita and Hurley; a postcard picturing the main street of Hurley and the huge smokestack that was supposed to carry sulphurous smelter emissions away from the community; a postcard picturing an AT&SF ore train entering the crusher house at the Kennecott smelter in Hurley. See a larger version of these photos and postcards. ~ Photos courtesy of Andy Romano; postcards from Bob Ingraham’s collection

Later, Marvin worked for a car dealership in Silver City. He never had far to go to work. Santa Rita is about seven miles by road east of Arenas Valley, and Hurley some nine miles southeast; Silver City is five miles west of Arenas Valley. In 1957, Marvin purchased the Silver Heights Gulf gas station, located on Silver Heights Boulevard, from his good friend Charlie Tutor. Marvin would have posted the cover to Gulf sometime between 1957 and 1963, while he was a Gulf dealer: either while he still lived in Arenas Valley or, later, on a visit to friends there. By 1963, he had been hired by ENCO to operate a new gas station in Silver City. Four years later, Marvin accepted a job with the newly reopened Phelps Dodge Corporation copper mine at Tyrone, five miles south of Silver City.

Marvin eventually left Phelps Dodge during a shutdown (a common occurrence in the mining industry) and moved to Morenci, Arizona, where he was hired as a full-time preacher at the Church of Christ. On January 27, 1985, Marvin had a heart attack and died in bed.

The building that had housed Marvin’s Gulf gas station was renovated in 1980 and eventually became the home of Stiles Real Estate, owned by real estate brokers Don and Laura Stiles. It is still serving the real estate industry, under new owners, as Enchantment Realty, a name borrowed from New Mexico’s state slogan, the “Land of Enchantment”.

Enchantment Realty, former home of M.J. Fell’s Gulf gas station on Silver Heights Boulevard in Silver City. ~ Image courtesy of Google Maps

The Arenas Valley school bus

While researching this web page, I realized that I almost certainly rode the school bus to and from school in Silver City with Don’s older brother, David. I was five years older, though, and would have seen him as just a “little kid”, not worthy of the attention of the older, “sophisticated” boy I imagined myself to be.

The school bus that David and I rode played a significant role in my life. I came to know the bus driver, “Chink” Tony, well. (There was, by the way, no racist condescension in his nickname that I ever noticed. Everyone called him “Chink”, probably because someone, long before my time, thought he looked Chinese. That’s not to say Silver City was free of prejudice: in the late 1940s, a Chinese restaurant employee was murdered there. But during my years in Silver City, two or three Chinese families were fully part of the town, and their kids were popular in high school.)

Chink brooked no bad behaviour on the bus. I remember once when one of the boys was misbehaving on the ride home after school. The boy ignored Chink’s first warning, but there wasn’t a second one: When the boy continued misbehaving, Chink pulled off the road about a mile from our bus stop, opened the door, and ordered him to get off the bus and walk! Chink would never get away with that in these more-permissive times. Unfortunately.

I have little doubt that Chink remembered at least one incident involving me. One school day, shortly after climbing onto the school bus and moving to the back to be with my friends, I realized that something wasn’t quite right. What wasn’t right was the feeling that there were creepy crawlies inside my clothes. There were creepy crawlies inside my clothes! Large, vicious red ants! I had been standing, cluelessly, on a red ant hill while I awaited the school bus. A not-insignificant number of them had crawled up my legs, even into my underpants and undershirt, and were stinging me. The school bus was approaching my house when I raced down the aisle and yelled to Chink that he had to let me off! He stopped and opened the door, and I raced into the house, tearing my clothes off as I ran. Mom was surprised to see me, but was soon spreading soothing calamine lotion on my ant stings, getting some fresh clothes for me, and driving me to school.

One incident on the school bus proved that I was no Romeo. Around grade five, I “fell in love” with Eileen Neil, an attractive high school girl and a friend of my sister, Helen, who is four years older than me. I was “flirting” with Eileen as the school bus approached my stop. I soon learned that flirting with “older women” was not necessarily a good idea. Eileen, who was bigger and stronger than me, turned out to be a bully who threatened to kidnap me!³

You can’t go home again…

They say that you can’t go home again, and that’s true, especially if you’ve been away from “home” so long that you can scarcely recognize it when you do manage to visit. I left home in 1962 to join the U.S. Navy, and only returned for brief visits before my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Ingraham, died. But an old, used envelope franked with ordinary stamps has taken me back to a Silver City that will never again exist. The cover that Marvin Fell posted to the Gulf corporation in Houston led to my email exchanges with Don and Pat Fell, who generously shared their family’s history and the story behind the cover. It seems that you don’t have to live next door to people, or even in the same country, for them to seem like friendly, helpful next-door neighbours!