In December 2010, I was selected to join the elite team of Good Morning Gloucester http://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/ authors, posting a daily contribution called "Did you know" featuring photos or paintings and a brief history or information about the subject. To see my "Did You Know" posts, visit http://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/author/ejlefavour/.
Good Morning Gloucester (GMG) is a long standing blog created by Gloucester, lobster broker Joey Ciaramitaro ("Joey C."). GMG is a snapshot of living and working on the docks of the oldest commercial fishing harbor in the United States. Good Morning Gloucester began as a daily post on the Cape Ann Online message board. Joey would post photographs that he took while going to the docks before dawn each morning. This thread became unruly and was moved over to a blog in December of 2007. Within a year it was recording more than 30,000 visits per month which made it the most active blog on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Good Morning Gloucester now receives as many as 35,000 visits per day and has had over 9,000,000 visitors. Since March of 2009 the Good Morning Gloucester blog has been displayed prominently on the Cape Ann newspaper, The Gloucester Daily Times website front page. In September 2011, Good Morning Gloucester was voted #1 People's Choice Award Blog in the CBS Best of Boston Blog competition. If you love the North Shore of Massachusetts, especially Cape Ann, click on the link above and subscribe to GMG. A daily email of current postings will arrive in your mailbox, or just click on the link to go to the blog website and see what's happening here.
You saw it first on Good Morning Gloucester - the letter that arrives nearly 66 years after it is mailed.
On March 26, I stopped into Annisquam Village Realty to visit with Tom O'Keefe who works at the Village Realty, as well as being the curator of the Annisquam Historical Society and The Art Gallery. While there, he showed me the above letter, which he had been given a couple of days earlier by the mailman, who was unable to deliver the letter (as the recipient was long deceased) and thought it would be something Tom would like for the Historical Society. I thought it was fascinating, and asked Tom if he would let me borrow it to scan and put up on my GMG Did You Know post to share with readers. He agreed and so I did for that day's post. See link to that post below.
http://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/did-you-know-the-mail-must-go-through-amazing/
The next morning I received a call from Jarrod of Fox News saying he wanted to come do an interview. I directed him to Annisquam Village Realty and told him I would contact Tom and we would meet them there. Little did I know, my GMG post about the letter had gone viral. Tom later received calls from Channel 7, CNN, The Boston Globe, the Herald, and I received a call from Francis Quinn at the Gloucester Times.
Letter arrives – nearly 66 years later: MyFoxBOSTON.com
http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/local/letter-arrives-nearly-66-years-later-20110328
Francis Quinn includes this story in the March 29th edition of the Gloucester Times. In Michigan, Sylvia DeBoever, niece of Sarah Lawrence and Gloucester native who reads the Gloucester Times on line every day, see the article and contacts me.
http://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/the-mail-must-go-through-part-3/
I've now gotten to know and really like Sylvia, and hope to get together with her when she comes home to Gloucester next year for her 55th class reunion. Although they have not yet received the Grimsland cover mailed to her aunt in 1945 as it is still in the possession of the USPS, and want to have it for a time to enjoy and do some research on themselves, she thinks that she will most likely donate the cover to the Annisquam Historical Society down the road, so Tom O'Keefe will have a nice full story piece of history for the exhibit.
This is an amazing example of the positive kind of stuff that comes out of Good Morning Gloucester, so if you don't already subscribe, you should. Go to http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Goodmorninggloucester and subscribe today. It's free, it's fun, it's informative, and it is so very positive.