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:

• the locality address was “City,” so this would have been sent on the eve of the 1963 conversion to Zip Codes;
• the bar cancellation extension (“Golden Anniversary Dairy Cattle Congress”) highlighted a September classic in Northeast Iowa, an agricultural exposition still operating today now known as the National Cattle Congress, eagerly awaited in 1962 by all Waterloo K-12 students like me because it offered a midway and carnival rides and all schools closed for the first Monday of the fair’s run;
• the home of the addressee was just two doors down from that of a friend of mine;
• and finally, because 30 years after this was sent, I worked for the sender, The National Bank of Waterloo.

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.

• First, would the letter have been returned to sender, or would Mrs. Congleton have been assessed the four cents due? I suspect that the latter would have been the case and her letter carrier would have included a small manila payment due envelope with this mailing (possibly followed by a frosty call from Mrs C to her banker).
• Second, how on earth would so common (to anyone but me, I suppose) an item have entered the philatelic collector stream and when?

I enjoyed Mr. Youngblood’s article and had great fun learning about the addressee.
Henry E. Edsill, Waterloo, IA

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