Alan Ball was a teenager making his first trip abroad when he decided to write a postcard to his folks back in Ottawa. But the Rev. Frederic Ball and his wife Elizabeth never got it.

Credit the post office for at least returning the postcard to its sender. Dr. Alan Ball got back his never-delivered postcard – 72 years after he licked the 2-cent stamp.

Ball was flabbergasted to learn the 1953 mailing to his parents was recovered and would be forwarded to him.

“I’ll be doggoned,” Ball, 88, said during a phone interview from his home in Sandpoint, Idaho. “It’s a beautiful day here. You just made it more beautiful.”

As previously reported,, an employee at the Ottawa Post Office on Etna Road spotted on Aug. 8 a postcard depicting the United Nations building in New York City, postmarked 1953. It was addressed to the Rev. F.E. Ball at a house in the 500 block of Catherine Street, Ottawa, and signed by “Alan.”

Ottawa Postmaster Mark Thompson said he’d never seen a piece of mail turn up seven decades late, but he doesn’t suspect a delivery failure by the U.S. Postal Service. Instead, Thompson said he thinks the card was mishandled inside the UN, slipped into a crevice and only recently was discovered and put in the mail.

Thompson spent the next few days trying to find out who “Alan” was. With a little help from local genealogists, Thompson located Ball and returned him the postcard.

Shown a digital image of the card, Ball said he recognized his handwriting – “Absolutely, it sure is” – though he didn’t remember being inside the UN building, nor did he recall sending a postcard to his parents.

But he well remembered the summer of 1953. Ball was on summer break from Ottawa Township High School and had saved up his pennies for a vacation in the Caribbean.

“I mowed lawns for a long time to buy an airline ticket to go to Puerto Rico because my mother’s sister, Aunt Mary, lived there,” Ball said. “She invited me to come down and visit for the summer, which was wonderful. I’d never been out of the country before.”

At that time, Ball said he hadn’t lived in Ottawa very long. His father, the Rev. Frederic Edgar Ball, was a Methodist minister who’d moved his wife and three sons from Galena to Epworth United Methodist Church in Ottawa. (An archived news article showed the Rev. Ball served five years before moving on to Chicago.)

Ball himself would move from Illinois. After graduating from Ottawa High in 1954, he enrolled in Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where she earned his undergraduate degree and met his wife, Jeanie.

He then earned a medical degree from the University of Iowa and moonlighted in a Des Moines emergency room while trying to build up a family practice. Emergency medicine, he discovered, suited him more than family practice.

After some itinerant years practicing medicine, Ball yearned to put down permanent roots and looked west. Jeanie wanted to be near the mountains and he near the water. They struck a happy compromise after attending a family reunion in Idaho and found Sandpoint in the Idaho panhandle, north of Couer d’Alene.

The local hospital was looking for someone to establish an emergency room and needed an experienced ER doctor. Ball signed on and later retired in Sandpoint.

“It’s kind of an artsy community, kind of a vacation spot,” Ball said. “Never regretted that move, I’ll tell you.”

Ball was reunited with the 72-year-old mail thanks to local genealogists. After Shaw Media published a story about the discovery of Ball’s postcard, genealogists Terry Carbone of Streator, Heidi Sobkowiak of Granville and the La Salle County Genealogy Guild all supplied information used to locate Dr. Ball.