A tiny country post office
played a big role in my youth

In 1949, when I was six years old, I moved with my parents and sister from New York State to the tiny village of Arenas Valley, six miles east of Silver City in southwestern New Mexico. Arenas Valley had originally been called Whiskey Creek, apparently because once, after a heavy rain, whiskey barrels had floated down a nearby arroyo (a steep-sided, normally dry gully) from an upstream still. The name was changed when postal officials decreed that "Whiskey Creek" wouldn't look proper on a cancellation. So it became Arenas Valley. Here is an envelope from that period, mailed by Postmaster Olga Mae Harper, who was the mother of my best childhood friend, Ernest Harper:

Arenas Valley Postmaster Olga M. Harper mailed this envelope, containing a quarterly report for July-August, 1947. Envelopes postmarked in Arenas Valley, which was never larger than a small village, are very difficult to find. (The meaning of the three October 3, 1947 date stamps? I think that Mrs. Harper was just testing the rubber stamp.) Click on the envelope to see a larger image.

The new name suited the location well: Arenas is Spanish for sand, and Arenas Valley is a very sandy place. One time I was playing down at the aforementioned arroyo with Ernest and his older brother, James. They decided that it would be clever to pour handfuls of sand down my shirt and into my pants. I was mad as hell, but utterly impotent: Ernest was bigger than me, and James was bigger than Ernest, and I learned what it's like to have sand in one's underwear! But I digress: The post office officials might also have chosen any number of other, appropriate names for Whiskey Creek: "Jackrabbit Valley," "Yuccatown," or simply "Tumbleweed" (or their Spanish equivalents) would have been entirely suitable.

The village post office

Arenas Valley could boast of just one public institution — its post office. On December 13, 1946, Olga Harper was named Postmaster. In my collection is a photocopy of the document that records her appointment; click on the thumbnail image at the left to see a larger image. The post office opened for business on January 1, 1947; it was located in the Harper home, which also housed a small general store. I recall the store, but not the post office as it was then.

After more than five years, Mrs. Harper closed the store and ended her postal career. The post office was relocated just one lot to the east, on the property of Joe L. Moore was appointed Acting Postmaster on April 30, 1952, and set up shop just one lot to the east, in a building near his home. Joe Moore would not serve long, however: He was suffering from tuberculosis and died on October 23, 1952. His wife, Hazel V. Moore, succeeded him; she was appointed Arenas Valley Postmaster on June 3, 1953.

The post office administered by Joe Moore and then by Hazel was a nondescript, one-room wooden structure of indeterminate age and heritage, a front door, a gritty linoleum floor, and a large crawl space at the back. When I was in grade 8 — I was 13 or 14 years old — I wrote a descriptive paragraph about the Arenas Valley post office for my teacher, Miss Rhodes. My wife, Susan, recently re-discovered the paragraph in an old scrapbook. Curiously, it was written on October 4, 1956, which happened to be her 11th birthday. I received an "A" for content and an "A-" for "mechanics"! Handwriting must not have part of "mechanics"; an easy-to-read transcription of the paragraph will be kinder to your eyes.

I don't remember Joe Moore at all, but I remember Hazel well. She was a thin slip of a woman, the blond-haired mother of three waif-like little kids, Jimmy, Charlie, and Suzy. She always appeared to be near collapse from illness or exhaustion or sadness — or perhaps all three. But she was a kind woman who liked us kids, and patiently endured our unlimited curiosity about the larger world that she represented. In turn, we both respected her and felt so comfortable in her presence that we easily called her not Mrs. Moore, but simply "Hazel."

My friends and I obviously assumed that Hazel took special interest in our activities. Danny Sanders and I once proudly went into the post office to show her our latest acquisition, a very large, rather angry bullsnake. Her response shocked us, and probably the snake, too: She screamed. It wasn't a girlish "Eek!" — it was full-throated, adrenalin-charged scream.

At the time I probably didn't know the word phobia, and was certainly unaware of ophidiophobia, an obsessive and irrational fear of snakes. Hazel, it's clear now, was ophidiophobic. I'm sure that Danny and I thought that Hazel might die of fright, and that we would bear the responsibility for her death. We retreated, with our alarmed snake, having learned a valuable lesson: Never walk unannounced into a U.S. post office with a large bullsnake!

Box 28

I remember our mailbox, Box 28. It was one of 30 or 40 cubbyholes to the left of the ornate wicket, featuring decorative cast-metal doors with simple alphabetic combination locks. We unlocked the door simply by first twisting the pointer counter-clockwise so it stopped on "N," then clockwise until it met "C." I also remember an experiment that I tried once, when Hazel wasn't in the post office: I opened Box 28 and reached in and through to see if I could get mail out of other boxes. And I could! I could easily reach the contents of all of the eight boxes which surrounded Box 28. I didn't take a thing, of course! I was no thief, except in fantasy!

Stamps at the wicket & stamps on approval

I joined the Boy Scouts in the early 1950s, at about the same time that some new 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. Hazel played her role perfectly. From behind her wicket, she would willingly show me new issues that she had received and would sort through sheets of stamps to find ones that were perfectly centered, or nearly so. Hazel, unlike so many of today's so-called "postal clerks," always separated them from their sheets with a surgeon's precision. I usually bought plate blocks and carefully stored them in a small booklet with pages consisting of glassine pockets.

Among the stamps that I purchased at the Arenas Valley Post Office
were these 1950s issues.

Most of my money went for approvals from such companies as Jamestown Stamp Company, H.E. Harris, Garcelon Stamp Company, and Kenmore. Such companies would mail their clients inexpensive stamps, often in short sets 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 for any stamps that were kept. It was an honor system, one that most collectors upheld (although I must confess that I, as a youthful collector, was not always prompt at making my returns). Often, however, I eagerly awaited the arrivals of the day's mail to see if it might contain a new selection of approvals for me.

At the left is an image of an approval sheet from the well-known Garcelon Stamp Company, of Calais, Maine. It probably dates from the late 1940s. Such approvals normally included only common stamps. In the case of this sheet, however, the four Irish postage due stamps (the first set in the second row), priced only 35 cents, today catalogue at about $60. (Click on the approval sheet to see a larger image.)

(Note: Stamp dealers rarely sell stamps at full catalogue value. The "street price" is almost always discounted considerably, and the "buy price" of most stamps is rarely more than 30 per cent of catalogue value.)

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 longer after I started collecting was a Hungarian airmail issue, eight large stamps in squares and diamonds featuring both real and model airplanes. It was issued in 1954, which meant that it must been hot off the press, or nearly so, when I purchased it. I don't recall whether I got the stamps on approval or as a result of a special offer similar to this one, from the March, 1956 Popular Mechanics Magazine:

1956 Popular Mechanics Magazine stamp advertisement featuring the 60-fillér value of a 1954 Hungarian airmail issue.

That set of airmail stamps was in my collection until the late 60's, when I sold everything and imagined — foolish me! — that I would never again collect stamps.*

In my collection I have a treasured picture postcard which, although it doesn't have an Arenas Valley postmark, at least passed through the Arenas Valley Post Office. I mailed it to my parents from a Boy Scout camp, Camp Tuff Moses, deep in the Gila Forest:

In June, 1954 I spent a week at Camp Tuff Moses in the Gila National Forest, and mailed this postcard to my parents. Click on the image to see the back of the postcard, and learn more about my experiences at camp.

Arenas Valley today is a sad little bedroom community whose residents have forgotten the virtues of fresh paint and pulling weeds. The lush orchards and neatly kept homes and gardens of my childhood have largely vanished, and "development" has allowed roads and "mobile homes" to sprawl across the arid valleys and hills where I once could hike for hours and never see another soul. (I should come clean and admit that not all of the homes in Arenas Valley were tidy; some were little more than tar paper-covered shacks with "gardens" that produced nothing but tumbleweeds, red ants, rocks, and goathead weeds, the seeds of which could puncture bicycle tires. Some yards were nothing but junkyards. Sadly, these attributes now represent most of the village.)

In recent years I have begun collecting stamps once again. Among my recent acquisitions is an identical mint set of those beautiful Hungarian airmail stamps. When I saw them again, I was transported back to the wonderful days when the world came to me through Box 28, Arenas Valley, New Mexico.

* Why did I stop, back there in 1969? I think that I had begun to think of stamp collecting as a child's hobby. As well, I was a young adult, newly married, a new immigrnt to Canada with a new job. I suppose that I didn't need a hobby. As I say in that article, stamps represented for me a window on the larger world, and by the late 60's I had experienced quite a lot of that larger world. In short, stamps were no longer very interesting to me. Truth be told, they still aren't all that interesting to me. Today, I only collect particular stamps that help to illuminate and literally illustrate past events that pique my interest, and I am far more interested in covers than in stamps.