FILE: to-wayside-wishes-greeting-co.txt — 11,204 bytes

From the desk of BURT GANNETT · host, "Burt's Backroads" · Channel 8 · Saturdays 10:30 a.m. (right after the polka hour) · on the air since 1977

To the good people of WAYSIDE WISHES GREETING CO., Box 411, Mount Halgrove —

Folks, hello. It's Burt. I'm writing this from the same orange diner booth I do all my real correspondence from, and the waitress (her name is Pat, you would have loved her, she has opinions) has already topped me off twice. So I'd better get to it.

I want to say thank you.

Listeners of the show will know I've been crisscrossing this region for going on fourteen years. I've eaten pie in every county seat and a few that gave up being seats. I've stood on every covered bridge that's still standing and a couple that aren't. And in every single one of those towns — every gas-station notions counter, every hardware store with a spinner rack by the register, every truck stop with that one shelf above the postcards — there you were. Wayside Wishes. Square cards. Lavender envelopes. Boy, you talk about a steady companion.

I heard the news from Marlene at the Marshneck Truck Stop, Exit 41. She said the last shipment came in April — six boxes, mostly birthdays, a few sympathies, one whole box of "SAW A HERON, THOUGHT OF YOU" which is and was my favorite card in the whole catalog. Marlene says the spinner rack now holds harmonicas. Folks, I have nothing against a harmonica. But.

I want the record to show — and this letter is going to your last known PO box, which I am told a kind neighbor still checks on Tuesdays — that your cards mattered to people out here. Specifically. By name. Let me list a few:

• WW-018, "GLAD YOU MADE IT THROUGH WINTER" — my uncle Don bought a stack of forty in 1983 and sent one to every person he had ever loaned a ladder to. He never explained the criteria. He never had to.
• WW-074, "SORRY ABOUT YOUR HIP" — sent to me, personally, after my hip, by my producer, who is not otherwise sentimental. I cried in the parking lot of a Hardee's.
• WW-112, "CONGRATULATIONS ON THE NEW DRIVEWAY" — there is no other card in the world that says this. The Ostmans framed theirs. It is in the kitchen, next to a corn-on-the-cob clock.
• WW-156, "SYMPATHY FOR THE LOSS OF A GOOD DOG (SPRINGER SPANIEL)," and the matching WW-157, "SYMPATHY FOR THE LOSS OF A GOOD DOG (OTHER)." The specificity, folks. The specificity.
• WW-203, "SAW A HERON, THOUGHT OF YOU" — see above. The blue is the right blue. I don't know how Henrietta got that blue.
• WW-221, "ANNIVERSARY AT THE BUFFET" — my wife and I send this to each other every June. We always have. We will keep doing it until the supply runs out. After that we will photocopy it, badly, on purpose.
• WW-244, "WELCOME TO TOWN (no occasion required)" — a card you could give a stranger. A card that said: someone here already likes you. There should be more of these in the world. There are now fewer.

I never met Henrietta Wayside. I tried, once, when we were filming a segment up by the falls in '86. The receptionist was very kind. She said Henrietta was "in the back, fighting with the press again." That sounded right to me, and I left a thank-you note and a tin of fudge and got back on the road. We did the rest of the segment at a Dairy Queen. Henrietta sent the fudge tin back, washed and dried, with a card. WW-244. Of course.

I'm told she passed in '89. I'm told her grandnephew tried to keep things going but the paper supplier moved to Memphis and the illustrator — a woman named June Aukett-Mears, and folks if you know her work you know — had stopped answering letters because her hands were tired, and they were. And so it ended the way these things do — quietly, with a final shipment to a truck stop in April, and a spinner rack of harmonicas.

What I want to say is this. If you are the grandnephew, or June, or the kind neighbor with the PO box key, or somebody who used to glue the foil onto the inside of the anniversary cards: you made the route better. You really did. Every town I stopped in, somebody had one of your cards on the fridge. I never had to explain Wayside Wishes on the show. People just nodded.

If there is anything left of you out there — a sample book, a stack of seconds, the original art for the heron, a roll of unprinted lavender envelopes — I would consider it the honor of the program to feature it. We'd film in good light. We'd let it breathe. I would not, repeat not, ask anyone to part with anything they wanted to keep.

That's the letter. Pat is hovering with the check.

Drive carefully. Look at herons.

— Burt Gannett
"Burt's Backroads," Channel 8
P.O. Box 6, Halgrove Junction