Yes, Virginia, You Can Mail From North Pole--but It Takes 32 Years

The Breese family was never much for writing letters--or, as it turns out, for receiving them.

But the Breeses got lucky a few days ago when a letter dropped out of the postal twilight zone into Chula Vista--32 years after it was mailed from the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, during the first voyage under the North Pole.

“I haven’t got the foggiest idea what was in it. I didn’t even know it was missing. I’d forgotten all about it,” said Denny Breese, the seaman who penned the missing letter to his younger brother, Nick. They learned of its discovery last week.

“That was a hell of a long time ago,” Denny Breese added. “I was amazed, very surprised, to say the least, that it was found.”

The letter--more significant for its commemorative seal and being lost for more than three decades than for its simple contents--now is in the hands of the Breese brothers’ father, R. V. Breese, the 77-year-old family patriarch who still lives in Chula Vista.

“Oh, my yes, it was a big surprise,” R. V. Breese said. “Denny didn’t write that much. Maybe once a month at the most. The whole family is like that though. That’s what makes this all the more interesting.”

Denny Breese, now 56 and hunting sunken treasure in the Atlantic Ocean off North Carolina, was a 25-year-old electronics specialist when he wrote Nick a one-page letter dated Aug. 6, 1958, three days after the historic voyage. Sensing a bit of history in the making, he had hurriedly penned 15 to 20 letters to relatives and friends.

The letters were stamped with special markings--a large map of the North Pole and a postmark reading USS NAUTILUS. NORTH POLE. 11:15 p.m. AUG. 3, 1958--and sent off.

“Nick, this will be short, but I just found out that (the) mail is leaving the boat in about 15 minutes. Please forgive me, I promise I’ll write soon as we get in . . . . I just want you to get this envelope that was stamped at the North Pole. Some people think they’ll be worth money to collectors someday. Drop me a line. I’ll write from England. Love, your brother, Denny.”

The Nautilus’ voyage was a success, but the letter disappeared. Denny Breese was not the only one to have forgotten it.

“No, he didn’t know anything about it until just the other day,” said Nick’s wife, Sandra, from Ft. Worth, Tex., where he lives these days. “It was a surprise.”

Although postal officials occasionally can explain the whereabouts of missing letters being delivered years later--there have been sacks of mail discovered in long-locked attics or closets--no one seems to know where Denny Breese’s letter has been all these years.

Apparently, it did not even attract the attention of the mail carrier who delivered it.

San Diego postal officials say they have no idea where the letter was. Last week it simply arrived at the old Breese homestead in Chula Vista, a blue-collar city near San Diego.

The Breeses moved more than 20 years ago, but the house’s present residents, Kathy Atkinson and Samuel and Amanda Rothstein, asked around the neighborhood and learned that R. V. Breese still lived a few blocks away. They hand-delivered it the other day.

“That was awful nice of them,” Breese said. “They didn’t have to do that. They could have just thrown it away.”

Breese, a prizefighter during the Depression and a retired fire chief, said he will keep the letter for at least a few days until he decides how to get it to Nick.

Breese thinks highly of the U.S. Postal Service--”I’ve never had a bill lost yet,” he said--but he is hesitant about dropping the long-lost letter into another mailbox.

“I could send it special delivery, but I don’t know,” he said. “The odds of it getting lost again are 10 million to one, but Nick might be out here soon, so maybe I could just wait and hand it to him.”