2/27/2021
Wayne Youngblood’s article, “Something’s Missing,” was accompanied by an intriguing (to me) cover (Figure 3, a 1962 postage due), a business mailing from a bank to one of its customers.
It caught my eye for many reasons:
I grew up in Waterloo and have spent most of my life living and working here, but I did not recognize the name of the addressee. My wife and I spent a few hours searching for information about this lady and her husband, and we were amazed at the amount of information we were able to find in our search, almost 60 years after the letter was sent.
Mrs. Congleton was born here in the Cedar Valley in 1905, and was a 1923 graduate of Iowa State Teacher’s College (now University of Northern Iowa) in Cedar Falls and was a teacher. She married in 1935, and while we did not confirm whether she continued teaching after her marriage, we suspect that she did because she and her husband, Joe, never had any children.
The Congletons moved to the address on the cover sometime around 1943, and in the short time between their marriage and that year it was clear that they had experienced significant financial success, as they had relocated several times to increasingly nicer neighborhoods; this Prospect Boulevard property was their last home, Ethel having died in 1983, then Joe in 1996.
I have two questions for Mr. Youngblood.
I enjoyed Mr. Youngblood’s article and had great fun learning about the addressee.Henry E. Edsill, Waterloo, IA
Gary Wayne Loew
Gary Wayne Loew is the former Editor in Chief of The American Philatelist.
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