After moving his corporate office from Paramus to Hackensack, New Jersey, a business owner was befuddled when two letters landed in his mailbox, dated 1946. With no clue where the 75-year-old missives had come from, he went the extra mile to track down the relatives of the original letter writers and gave them a missing piece of family history.
Gary Katen moved his office on June 18, 2021, and grew frustrated when his mail was not forwarded.
“Normally we get volumes of mail,” he told The Epoch Times. “I’ve had my assistant going back and forth to the post office, and then all of a sudden one day ... I open up my mailbox, and there’s some personal mail.”
Gary had initially been convinced that the old letters—sent a week apart, dated May, then April 1946—were a prank by a friend from out of town to whom he had bemoaned his troubles with the post. However, they were legitimate.
Both sent from California, each letter bore a 6-cent airmail stamp and two 1-cent stamps, and were “almost in perfect condition, even the envelopes,” said Gary. Fearing it was illegal to open someone else’s mail, he didn’t dare to touch the letters until the second arrived, at which point his wife, Ronnie, insisted to open them.
As they opened up the letter in the dark to read it, they were “tearful,” Gary said, as the contents of it were very sweet.
Flabbergasted, Gary called his friend Mike Woods, a morning weather reporter for Fox 5 News, as he wanted to find the family.
“I said I‘d like to find the family because, obviously, they’ve lived in my house,” Gary told The Epoch Times. “I’d like to find them and give them the letters; this is World War II era, they never got there!”
Meanwhile, Gary and his wife began digging the Hackensack public records building in July 2021. However, they were unable to dig too far back, as the building had caught fire. They also traced back to the two previous owners of the house before them, but they really couldn’t get anywhere.
They made a breakthrough, however, when they realized that the handwritten recipient’s name on both letters was not “Frank,” as they first believed, but “Franck.”
This detail changed everything.
Gary explained: “Ronnie went online and looked at obituaries. The next day, she text me and said, ‘I spoke to her ... the daughter of the woman who wrote the letters. Her name is Patricia.’
“It was like an out-of-body experience. Initially, we asked for the mother, and she said, ‘Well, who is this?’ Ronnie was trying to explain, and [Patricia] said, ‘Well, she passed away 10 years ago ... how do you know her? I’m her daughter.’ That was the instant connection.”
Gary claimed that Patricia went through shock and disbelief before claiming she felt like she hit the lottery as she and her brother, Bruce, had saved all correspondence from their late parents, Jean and Richard Barthold, until they died. Patricia kept everything in a binder.
After communicating with the family, Gary felt like he, too, had hit the lottery. He explained: “You could tell this was a really tight-knit family. I think it was a great feeling for them that they got the letters, but I think it was equally a good feeling for us that we made the connection.”
Gary sent both letters to Bruce in San Antonio, Texas. He was even recognized at the FedEx depot from his TV news segment and spent 40 minutes showing the 75-year-old correspondence to fascinated FedEx staffers.
In exchange for the letters, Bruce was able to show the Katens photos of the house—that they had stayed in for the last 20–22 years—during his parents’ residence, via FaceTime.
Gary also learned that young Jean and Richard, then engaged, were driving cross-country to California on a three-week trip in 1946 when they wrote their letters home to Richard’s parents, Eugene and Nellie Franck, who lived in the same house.
Richard had served in World War II before he married his sweetheart and started their family.
Looking back, Gary suspects that the 75-year-old letters were either stuck in a machine or lost behind a desk at the post offices during the elections when sorting machines were moved through the post offices.
However, he believes that the postmarks indicate the letters left California in 1946.
“I just think it didn’t get to Jersey, either,” he said. “It fell behind something and somebody finally put it in the mail.”
Having had the opportunity to connect the letters to the family, Gary said it was a “great feeling.”
“The one thing that both Patty and Bruce said to us was, ‘We thank you so much for not just tossing the letters, for going the extra mile to try and find us,’” he shared. “Now we’re good friends with them, after all this! It was a feel-good story in the midst of COVID, and all the bad things going on in the world.”
Gary and Ronnie were even slated to have coffee with Patricia’s relatives in New Jersey. With a pool of new friends and a very unique story to tell, Gary’s advice to others is to give all new connections the benefit of the doubt.
“If you have an opportunity to reach out and meet somebody that you don’t already know, odds are, they’re probably going to be a pretty good person,” he mused, “and that may change your life.”
