At the heart of any country town, the local post office is undoubtedly full of tales and the history of its community. We caught up with Kevin Baxter, owner of the Cleve Post Office, for an unexpected yarn that took us way back.
“In 1976, I started working at the post office and my wife Carmel and I bought it in 1992. Built in 1926, it’s a beautiful old building. Just recently, we’ve been doing some renovations and this week, our builder was doing some demolition which involved removing the old private mailboxes out of the wall at the front of the building. We couldn’t quite believe it when the building was dismantling everything and came across a perfectly preserved little slice of history,” Kevin says.
“An envelope containing a letter, an invoice and a cheque made out to none other than Ramsey Bros dated back in 1968 was pulled from the rubble. The letter had been partially eaten by silverfish, or something like that. But the invoice, written in the late Lloyd Ramsey’s handwriting, and the cheque — made out for a grand total of $1.95 — were still perfectly intact.
“Rewind back to 1968, when this customer would have said they’d sent payment of the invoice to Ramsey Bros. The postman would have gone to deliver it to the Ramsey’s private mailbox number 121 but unknown to everyone, the letter has slipped through the tiniest gap between the box and the wall. We’re talking about one to two millimetres, so it’s pretty uncanny that it lodged itself so perfectly out of sight until 2021,”
“Now, we’ve only been here since 1976, so I don’t take any blame personally but it’s great that this missing article has finally been resolved after well over 53 years,” Kevin says cheekily.
“All I can say is that we do always deliver… just sometimes it takes a bit longer!”
