By Rhonda Westfall

About the time that Gary Brown started delivering mail to residents on Traver Street, Sherry (Kentfield) Szekeres sent a letter from the Air Force Base in Lowell, Mass., to her parents, Ray and Dorothy Kentfield, in St. Johns.

That was 30 years ago. Somehow, the letter just arrived.

No one knows where the Air Mail envelope has been all this time - possibly stuck away in a basket or bag at the air base - but family members are anxious to return the letter to its writer and, finally, read its contents.

"We're waiting to hand-deliver it to Sherry who lives in Hartland," says her sister-in-law, Linda Kentfield, who lives with her husband, Terry, at 103 S. Traver where the letter was recently delivered.

"The seal on the envelope is intact - it's really in very good shape, considering how old it is and who knows where it's been."

The original postmark on the letter is barely legible as either 1971 or '72. It has one, 8-cent stamp of President Eisenhower, and three 1-cent stamps of Jefferson - enough postage for air mail delivery from a military base at that time.

A brand new 37-cent stamp has been placed on the yellowed envelope - but, oddly, it has not been canceled. Computer bar coding on the front and back of the envelope, however, attest to the fact that it was recently processed through U.S. Post Office equipment.

"It's a mystery as to where it’s been all this time - we'll probably never know," Linda says.

At the time the letter was mailed, Sherry and her husband would have just returned to the air base at Lowell from an assignment in Italy. Her sister-in-law believes that the daughter of Ray and Dorothy may have been writing to tell her parents about that experience.

Dorothy  passed away in 1997, while Ray died in 1985. He was a former mayor of St. Johns and served with the St. Johns Fire Department for many years.