Among my few dozen vintage postcards is one sent to Detroit a week before Thanksgiving 1908. It inspires thoughts about social networking via pens, paper and postage during that era B.C. [[Before Computers).
For some students and young adults back then, mail turned distant strangers into contacts. Their version of a virtual world, a Second Life, came through pen pal connections.
With a fountain pen, Rose M. Geis wrote from Syracuse, N.Y.:Her invitation, postmarked the morning of Nov. 21, 1908, went from Syracuse's northwest side to Robert L. Stuart on the edge of downtown Detroit at 888 Porter Street [[where the Lodge now stands).I saw your name to exchange postals. And I would like to correspondent with you.
Answer soon.
Because Robert saved the card and because he sought pen pals, presumably through a classified-style listing in a pulp magazine or other publication, he likely replied that fall to Rose's three-sentence entreaty. Answer soon.
Whether they corresponded [[or correspondented, as Rose would say) beyond two postcards can't be known . . . but is a thread a novelist or screenwriter could weave into an imaginative narrative that brings Rose to Detroit or Bob to Syracuse.
What's not fiction is that I hold something each of them held 101 years ago. The image side shows Syracuse University, my alma mater, so I bought it at a flea market. Now I wonder how it wound up there, possibly after sitting for many decades in a Stuart family closet, trunk or attic somewhere in this area.
Sitting at a desk without a fountain pen, ink bottle or postcard stamp, I think about young Rose, young Robert and this form of one-to-one social media that left an artifact to display where we indulge a similar interest in communicating . . . connecting . . . correspondenting.
How about you -- did you or someone you know every have a pen pal? Travel back to that time and share a memory here. Answer soon.
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