Returned to sender and back again in 77 years
Published: October 5, 2005
Whoever he was, C.Y. Shipman had a knack for launching a mystery.
Precisely 77 years ago, the Muskegon, Mich., man — or woman — was enjoying an aircraft exposition and dedication celebration at Albany’s new municipal airport on former Shaker farmland.
His likely entertainment during the four-day festival in October 1928 would have included admiring more than 100 aircraft on display, watching assorted plane races and a parachute contest and, perhaps, catching a glimpse of famous aviators including Amelia Earhart.
Finally, in tribute to the airport’s fresh, lofty status as a stop on airmail routes to Cleveland and Montreal, Shipman participated in one of the traditional main events at such celebrations.
He placed a 5-cent airmail stamp on an envelope, addressed it to his home back in Muskegon, Mich., and put the same street and city in the return address. He had the letter stamped in red ink with a special cancellation commemorating the Albany Air Meet before it winged its way back toward Michigan on Oct. 6, 1928.
Thanks to an unknown donor who bought the unopened letter for $7 at an Arizona flea market, Shipman’s souvenir is back at the airport, where Albany County Airport Authority staffers have speculated on the envelope’s contents for weeks.
On Tuesday, Chief Executive John O’Donnell ended the suspense and opened the envelope in front of a reporter, a photographer and several staff members with the aid of a steam machine that’s usually on duty removing wrinkles from airport gift shop T-shirts.
What he found inside — a blank index card used to stiffen the envelope — was a bit anti-climatic.
“Geraldo and O’Donnell,” the airport executive exclaimed, comparing his find to the empty Al Capone vault famously opened on live television by Geraldo Rivera back in 1986.
O’Donnell wasn’t disappointed, though. The true value of the letter was in prompting a new look at the airport’s history, he said.
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