Maine Woman Receives Mysterious Postcard Sent 54 Years Ago
Jessica Means has lived in the same Portland, ME house for 17 years, but on Monday she experienced a mysterious event she never anticipated.
In her mailbox was a postcard from Paris, France addressed to “Mr. or Mrs. Rene Gagnon” from a gentleman named Roy. Yet this wasn’t any usual vacation correspondence.
The letter was sent on March 15, 1969 and only just arrived at its prescribed destination this month. On the address block, the Gagnon’s names were crossed out and someone had written in “or current resident.”
That resident happened to be Jessica Means. “The Gagnons were the original owners of my home on Allen Ave. in Portland,” Means wrote in a Facebook post seeking to identify the sender(s). “They had it built in the early 1930s and lived here until the late 1980s or early ‘90s.”
The lightly tattered card boasts a daytime visual of the Arc de Triomphe on one side. On the other is a short message to the Gagnon’s.
“Dear folks,” Roy begins. “By the time you get this I will have long since been home, but it just seems proper to send this from the Tour Eiffel, where I am now. Don’t have a chance to see much but having fun.”
Web sleuths were quickly able to deduce who the intended recipients were.
Local records indicate that Rene Gagnon was born in Quebec in 1905 before emigrating to New Hampshire. He ran several auto body shops throughout his career, and in 1988 died after a long illness. Rose Rachel Gagnon, Rene’s wife, was born in Winooski, VT in 1912. She died at the age of 90, in Maine.
Rene’s obituary mentions that he has a daughter living in Germany with her husband, Roy Salzman. “That could be the Roy who signed the card,” Means told Bangor Daily News. “That would make sense.”
While it’s clear who the card was intended for, what remains mysterious is how it ended up at its destination 54 years later. The letter bears a new postmark from Tallahassee, FL dated July 12, 2023, but that is the first update made to the correspondence since 1969.
An obituary of another Gagnon relative reveals that some family members have been based around Florida since at least the 1970s. While it’s a possibility one relative still living there found the card and decided to mail it, Means can’t help but wonder why.
She hopes to locate the person who helped the letter finally reach its destination and put a bit of closure on this happy mystery. “I'd really like to say thank you to whoever decided to…drop it in the mail,” she said. “I just want that person to know that the card not only made it [here], but that that one small, simple gesture made my day.”
