A deployed Colbath mailed a letter to his bride in 1958
A lost letter from 1958 was finally delivered to a Blackshear address in early July and a local business woman is convinced her dear departed mother is trying to get her attention.
Tammy Riggins, owner of VIP Signs and Graphics and more recently, local eatery Crazy Rick’s, says the lost letter is a special window into the early days of her parents’ lives together.
Francis “Pete” Colbath never cared for his given name and neither did his future wife Geraldine “Gerry” Harris — when she learned of it. Riggins recalls her mother once saying, “If I had known that was your real name, I’d never have married you.”
Luckily, Francis was known as “Pete” to his friends at home and his fellow sailors in the Navy. Before too long, he would also be known as Pete by a young lady that had come with her sister to look at the Navy vessels anchored by the docks in Mayport.
“Mama saw him standing there up on the ship and she told my aunt, I’m going to marry that man up there,” says Riggins. “My aunt said, well, I guess we better go meet him then.”
The couple went on three dates, each one with a deployment out to sea for Pete in between the next. Proving three times makes charm, the third ended in A week later, Pete was deployed once more and his new bride at home, but did write her a letter. “I tell you what, the mail gotten real slow around That first line could have been written today, and even 1958 turned out to be truer than the newly married sailor could have ever suspected.
The letter never arrived. Riggins says she can just imagine her mother giving her dad a rough time about it. The local businesswoman just wishes her mother, Pete’s Gerry, had a chance to see it with her own eyes. Riggins’s father is still alive, living right here in Blackshear, but her mother passed away in 2022.
Even so, Riggins knows her mother is laughing up in heaven, well aware of the letters contents.
“She knows now, but I’d have liked to have seen her face as she read it, instead of reading it up there,” says Riggins. “She’s probably the one that made sure they got it to me.”
Riggins’s mother did have a little earthly help in the form of mail carrier Billy Williamson. Assigned to the downtown Blackshear route that includes Altman Street, when Billy saw the lost letter the first thing he noticed was an APO stamp. As a veteran himself, Williamson knew that stamp was reserved for military and diplomatic mail.
When the postal worker saw the year, 1958, his mind flashed back to that tumultuous time in history, America not long out of the Korean War and the protracted Vietnam War begun only a few years before. Williamson had heard before the stories of dead soldiers and lost letters, so he felt chosen to ensure the letter got where it needed to be, which took a little detective work.
It was addressed to “Mrs. Francis Colbath”, but Williamson initially read the name as Colbato. On top of that, the letter did not have a house number, saying only Altman Street. Google results on the last name “Colbato” did not turn up anything useful and even a trip to the tax assessors office to look up any potential records in the name yielded no results.
Luckily, Williamson had a connection. The girlfriend of a friend had a great-grandmother who lived on Altman Street. One of the older residents, Janice Stephens, had lived in the neighborhood for many years. Williamson asked the great granddaughter to enlist Stephens help to find the addressee.
Stephens knew very well who the missive was written to. A Harris before she became a Stephens, Janice was Gerry’s sister, the same one who had stood beside her on the dock that day when she pointed to a sailor and declared she was going to marry him.
As for where to find her? Heaven was the only place to look now, but Stephens contacted her granddaughter, who in turn brought the letter to Tammy Riggins.
The circle was completed at last, though not in the way Wiliamson might have expected. The soldier who wrote the letter still lived, but the bride he had written to so long ago was now gone.
Nevertheless, Riggins sees some heavenly handiwork in it, because the letter from 1958 was the second one involving her mother and father to find her. A week prior to the July 8 delivery by the post office, another letter took a circuitous route to reach Riggins.
Her father had moved in with her older brother, Rory, and Riggins had just finalized selling her parents’ old house. The new owner had instructed them to just leave anything they did not want in the building. Riggins made sure all the important things, especially keepsakes and mementos, including her parents old letters, were safely packed up and removed from the home. The rest was left for the cleaning crews to toss in a roll off dumpster.
Not long after, Riggins received a call from a lady who lived down the street. She had found a letter in her front yard, yet another missive written by Pete to his wife while on deployment.
Unlike the one yet to be delivered, this message had reached its intended destination, but Riggins had never seen it before and she was quite familiar with her parents correspondences. It had not been stored with the others and Riggins guesses that it must have gotten blown out of the dumpster to land in the neighbor’s yard as the junk was hauled away.
From a slightly later time period, this other letter was dated 1963 from not long after Riggins was born. Upon reading it, she got a chuckle out of her father’s sense of humor. Pete had penned the line to his wife, “And tell Rory, if he wants to throw Tammy in the trashcan, he can.”
Rory never took his dad up on the offer, and the two siblings remain close to this day. Brother, sister and father gathering at Crazy Rick’s for a Friday meal as they often do, Riggins told the others about the missing letter finally coming home.
The father’s reply was a simple, “You read my letter?” To which Riggins quipped back, “Well, it was delivered to me!” Clearly, Pete Colbath’s knack for jokes was passed on to his daughter.
That daughter sees more than coincidence when two different letters meant for her mother, letters Riggins herself had no knowledge of, find their way into her hands within a week of each other. “I thought, two in one week? This is just crazy! My mother is trying to tell me something!”
Questions remain about where exactly the 1958 letter lay undisturbed and undelivered for 67 years. Perhaps those answers might never be known. The postmaster for Blackshear was not available for comment prior to this edition going to press. Riggins says it is remarkably well preserved and the ink on it has not faded as one might expect, another little miracle in the face of so many already.
It was at the bottom of a bin of “mixed mail’ given to Williamson that day. Typically there is something wrong with the mail that has made it previously undeliverable and the carriers are encouraged to try finding its proper home. Riggins says she is very grateful and commends the dedication of Billy Williamson for going the extra mile to deliver the letter once it came into his hands. It is a snapshot of the early days of her parents marriage, one she will treasure and keep with other pieces of her family’s history.
