I’m compelled to ask this because a friend of the family recently posted a video of her preschool son. He’d gone to a church event and the “big kids” who helped out in his classroom sent him a letter thanking him for being such a good boy and all that. His mom explained it to him as he pulled it out of the mailbox and he spent the rest of the day living his best life. Everybody saw “awww.”
I actually got quite a bit of mail as a kid in the 70s and 80s. When the child support checks were coming in, Mom and I would go through these book catalogs they sent me home from school with and we’d order a few. I was also an inquisitive kid and a voracious reader, and had a wide range of interests, so I was frequently getting like school readers (I don’t know what they’d be called today; like a “magazine” about a variety of topics, geared towards younger readers) and such in the mail. And then when I was like 12/13 my grandparents ordered me a subscription to Discover Magazine, and I filled out every last card within to get more stuff. Eventually I wound up with a stack of books, including at least one anatomy text, that weren’t appropriate for kids and Mom put a stop to that.
Also, via whatever means the industry had at its disposal in the 70s/80s, the advertising community realized there was a child with disposable income living at #### South 9th Street in Springfield, and I got all sorts of catalogs and other stuff geared towards my interests.
Some postcards from friends on vacation, some birthday cards came by mail, I got the national and regional 4H magazines and subscribed to “Illustrert Vitenskap” (Illustrated Science, a Scandinavia based popular(ized) science monthly magazine). I remember getting a photocopied walkthrough for Police Quest 2 from someone from where I lived when I was 6, because it came up at a get-together for us and those other families. And a friend who moved away to the other end of the country once sent me a letter addressed in cyrillic … or possibly it was the other way round. Anyway. Receiving actual letters was a remarkable thing to me in the 80s and early nineties.
My extended family was small and lived nearby, so I didn’t get letters as a child. I had a subscription to Ranger Rick magazine and possibly some other nature type magazines … personal mail would be very unusual. Early 1960’s.
Boy’s Life magazine, occasional letters from friends and relatives, electronics and photography magazines. It wasn’t a lot, at most one piece of mail addressed to me a week on average.
I couldn’t afford subscriptions or anything like that, but I used to write to various NASA facilities, telling them I was a kid interested in space and wanted to do school projects and would appreciate it if they could send me anything they had.
I collected quite the trove over the years. I assume they sent me whatever useless stuff they had lying around, but most of it was awesome to me. I got lots of 8X10 photos of various sorts, some mission patches, technical reports and once an entire Skylab operations manual.
It was pretty exciting for a ten-year old kid to come home and find a thick manila envelope from the Goddard Space Center or the Johnson Space Center.
When I went to college my mom threw it all away. Sigh.
I did also sell greeting cards for a while, and that generated a bit of mail. And I corresponded once with Virginia Heinlein, Robert Heinlein’s wife who handled his correspondence at the time. She was very nice and very encouraging.
And once I saved up and got some Sea Monkeys from a comic book ad…
We were allowed to order the summer version of Weekly Reader magazine to be ordered to our house, since school was out. I enjoyed getting them.
In seventh grade my brother, who is ten years older than me, started a subscription for me to Popular Science in the 1970s, which I kept up through my college years. It was the start of personal computers, satellite TV, home electronics, imported cars, synthetic oil, etc. It really helped me keep up with rapidly changing technology.
If I did get mail as a very young child, I’m sure it was just cards and checks from relatives.
If you fast forward ahead a few years, then I did get a quite a lot. Off and on, I had subscriptions to Sports Illustrated, Sporting News, Baseball Digest and a bunch more. I’d also get catalogs about card collecting and Strat O Matic baseball. I was usually bored to tears during summer breaks so at least I had a lot to read.
I dropped most of the magazine subscriptions the summer before I went off to college, especially the time sensitive ones. I figured, correctly, that I’d want to spend my spare time doing something else
When I was a a little kid (under 10), my cousin’s (my dad’s family) lived three blocks away from us, and my cousin Tim (who was a year older than me) was my best friend. The same week that we moved to Green Bay, Tim’s family moved to Virginia. He and I became pen-pals, and we’d regularly send letters to each other.
Beyond that, I’d occasionally get a greeting card or letter from an out-of-town relative.
I had several magazine subscriptions (Ranger Rick and Boy’s Life as a pre-teen; later Football Digest and The Sporting News). I also collected stamps, and would get monthly mailings of stamps from Harris Stamps to buy “on approval” (i.e., anything I kept, I had to pay for; the rest, I’d have to mail back to them promptly).
When I was a teenager, I started playing several tabletop sports games, made by a company called APBA (@dalej42 – they were Strat-o-Matic’s competition), which sold their stuff only through mail order. So, I’d get twice-yearly mailings from them, featuring their new offerings, and then would get the new season’s game cards via mail order, as well.
There was a guy way back when who toured schools with an amazing meteorite collection. A few kids (like me) were recruited for the day to assist him. He handed out, for some odd reason, a form to get stuff for free from the US government printing office. I sent it in because … I didn’t think it through? So for years afterwards I got listings of recent govt. publications I could order and a bunch of other crap. It added up.
I had a friend who lived a few blocks away. One of us figured out that mail without a stamp would be returned to the person in the return address spot. We sent mail back and forth using this knowledge.
I wrote to various people trying to get autographs. Pat Paulson sent me an 8x10. I had a question published in the local paper’s Johnny Wonder column and received a globe as a prize!
I received very little hand-written mail as a kid. For a spell, as a teenager, I kept up with for about a year some girls I met in Poland (including my first kiss – I had almost forgotten about that until this thread), but that died off. In 7th or 8th grade, I did get autographs and a hand-written note from most of the dee-jays at WJMK (the oldies station – as in 50s and 60s music – at the time) with nice 5x7s of each of them. Plus I also wrote every aircraft defense contractor I could think of asking about their planes and pretty much every single one sent me a packet of beautiful 8x10 promotional photographs or their birds. I was surprised. I think Lockheed sent me something like 15 photographs, and everyone else sent me at least a handful. Plus the Department of Defense sent me a 150-200 page overview of Soviet Miltary power two years running. This one here: (the next one was called “Prospects for Change.”)
As a kid immersed in the Cold War, this was very cool.
Subsequent posts have reminded me of other mail I regularly got as a kid.
This reminded me that NASA had an address which you could write to, and they would send you a big envelope full of space photos. I sent away for those several times.
I discovered that, if one wrote to NFL teams, they would send back team photos, player photos, schedules, stickers, etc. I did a lot of that for a few years.
I did, because I had a lot of pen pals long before email was available. This was also when long-distance phone calls were limited in my household because they cost too much, so the only economical way to stay in touch with friends was to write letters.
