Dear Readers: There was a time...

Every few months, Rhode Island state legislator Patrick Kennedy writes a letter to a friend or a member of his politically noteworthy family.

He writes many short notes on fancy card stock to political and business associates and supporters, but his personal correspondence, he says, will doubtless never match that of his late grandfather--patriarch Joseph Kennedy, whose 150 cartons of personal letters served as a wellspring for biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin.

“Imagine what biographers are going to have to look at in 50 years. It will be just a bunch of old press releases, yellowed newspaper clippings. Maybe a some National Enquirers,” says Kennedy, 25, speaking not just of himself but of other prominent up-and-comers in fields such as the arts, politics, science and entertainment.

“How are you going to really size someone up without letters?” he asks.

Indeed, that question looms now for 21st-Century biographers and historians, whose livelihood is based on correspondence their subjects receive and write. Due to technological advances, the personal letter is now an endangered species.

“It will be devastating for scholarship,” says Sue Hodson, a curator at the Huntington Library in San Marino. “We will lose insights into the creative process.”

Without personal letters, which serve as intimate and personal records of the ordinary and the famous alike, Hodson predicts biographers and historians will face a most troublesome problem.

“The way a person puts words on a page, whether handwritten or type-written . . . the piece of themselves that people put into letters is likely to be lost,” says Hodson, curator of one of the major collections of American literary letters. “To what extent it will be lost I don’t know--yet.”

As she sifted through a neat stack of aging letters from Abraham Lincoln, T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Norman Mailer and Jack London, she said: “Every little letter is like a snapshot. Future literary historians aren’t going to have as easy a time.”

Holding a fading original handwritten in ink, she read aloud London’s answer to an editor who challenged facts in a story.

“Take my word for it,” London wrote, “. . . a man simply cannot build a fire with heavy Klondike mittens on his hands. . . . I have built a fire at 74-below zero, and I did it with my naked hands.”

Says Hodson: “You couldn’t have gotten this if they had said this over the telephone or sent it by deletable E-mail.”

Biographers confirm the potency of reading the original copy of an actual letter, and the power of holding it in their hands and puzzling over what it says about the writer and recipient as well.

Michael Schumacher, a Wisconsin writer who spent the last eight years working on “Dharma Lion,” a massive biography about poet Allen Ginsberg published last week, says: “Letters are really telling for a biographer. You get the mood of the moment.”

The most poignant time for Schumacher came as he read the letters that Ginsberg’s mother sent to the poet, begging him to free her from the mental hospitals where she had spent much of her life.

In her last letter, postmarked two days after her death in June, 1956, she wrote to him:

I wish I were out of here and home at the time you were young; then I would be young. . . . I hope you are not taking any drugs as suggested by your poetry. That would hurt me. Don’t go in for ridiculous things.

With love & good news,

Naomi

Schumacher previously had read the letter published in other places. But he said it was very important to “actually see the physical letter, the very frantic writing and realize you are dealing with a real, physical human being who was now dead. When you pick up a letter like this, it has its own reality.”

He marveled at the drawings in the margins of many of Ginsberg’s letters and at the chronic misspellings.

Schumacher pored over letters not only of Ginsberg and his family but of the poet’s fellow writers--Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs.

Now Schumacher has started a biography on maverick folk singer Phil Ochs, who killed himself in 1976 at age 36. Schumacher asked Ochs’ brother, Michael, if the singer ever wrote letters and was told, “Only a letter here and there, maybe a postcard.”

Says Schumacher: “I can always hope.”

For easily a decade, it has been axiomatic that Americans write less as phone service has improved around the world and also become less expensive. Postal officials confirm that “the Ma-and-Pa mail”--as household-to-household missives are called--has declined.

Fifteen years ago, the Ma-and-Pa mail accounted for close to 6% of the U.S. Postal Service’s volume. By 1991, the figure had dropped to 4.4%. “It is much more likely you’re going to get a bill or catalogue now,” says Meg Harris, Postal Service historian.

The decline in letter writing has also translated into stagnant sales for full-sized letter paper.

Steve Feinberg, manager of customer development at Crane & Co., the stationery manufacturer, says: “People seem to have less time to write letters. But they will write a personal note, saying thanks to someone, say, if they just had been taken to lunch. That’s been the case for the last decade. And I think it’s going to go more in that direction.”

Patrick Kennedy is a notes man.

Eighty-five percent of his correspondence is notes of thanks or appreciation, consisting of two to three sentences. “I don’t know if that is something Doris Kearns Goodwin could look at . . . and tell anything about me.”

But with Kennedy’s grandfather’s 150 cartons of letters, Goodwin deciphered a great deal about the clan for her 1987 book, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga.” She dug through an untapped treasure trove of personal letters Joseph Kennedy wrote to his wife and children.

“There is no question that in my research on the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, the letters were the richest source,” says Goodwin, whose books on the Kennedy family and on President Lyndon B. Johnson were critically acclaimed.

For documentation and for use in prompting questions, she says, it is hard to match the value of personal letters.

“People think they remember things the way they actually happened, but their memories . . . get clouded along the way and they remember things they way they want to remember past.”

Relying on letters, she says, “was so much more authentic than interviewing (people) after the fact about something.”

Gone are the days, she says, when houses had a room set aside for writing, as was the case in a historic house where she once lived in Concord, Mass.

“Today if we get a letter, I’m not sure that most people take the time to sit down and really read and enjoy the letter they’ve received--much less write back.”

And, she says, biographers in the future will miss “the genuine experience of emotions” contained in letters.

In the next century, she says, biographers will likely be forced to rely more on interviews rather than on letters.

They will also be forced to cope with a number of new technical problems posed by a shortage of personal correspondence.

Fax paper treated with chemicals has a questionable life span, curators say. The rapidly changing world of computers means that libraries and other research institutions will need to constantly update both hardware and software in order to read letters written on computer.

Even though technology now provides biographers with the luxury of seeing, hearing and even slow mo-ing their subjects on video, it’s still no replacement for a letter.

“That will be a real permanent loss--unless we can train a whole new generation to write letters again,” says Goodwin.

“I can’t imagine that any time is really spent on what people say in faxes.”

Artist Manuel Ocampo, 27, is a member of the up-and-coming fax-phone-and-video generation that finds letter-writing somewhat alien.

Ocampo is the hot and controversial painter on the L.A. art scene. But the passion and controversy are not recorded in personal correspondence because he rarely writes letters. He prefers to call.

“I have plenty just to paint about,” says Ocampo, who arrived six years ago from his native Philippines. “I’m just bad about writing. Just a simple ‘hi’ and ‘goodby.’ And I’m not very articulate in the English language.”

He does get mail from his mother and father back in the Philippines. The last letter he got came four months ago from his father, who asked for a new carburetor for his 1985 Blazer and for a specific colostomy bag he needed after surgery. And his mother, as always, attached a note saying she was praying for him.

Biographers will also have a tough time chronicling Matt Groening, the 38-year-old creator of the “Simpsons.” Although he’s besieged with mail, little of it is personal correspondence.

He does have computer software that creates a capital-letters type that replicates the shouting style of his “Life in Hell” cartoon series, and he says he likes to occasionally write to friends using that. “But it’s pretty annoying to read after two or three pages.”

Besides, he has little time to keep in touch with friends and family the way he once did.

“Letter writing these days is an act of particular generosity, and very few people have the time to do it,” he says.

Oddly, along with the success that comes with being biography-worthy comes less time to write letters that make for a biography.

Consider the plight of author Terry McMillan.

With the acclaim and demands accompanying her bestseller, “Waiting to Exhale,” McMillan now has difficulty writing personal letters. But once she did keep copies of her letters.

“I figure one day when I’m dead, somebody will find all these and say: ‘Gee whiz, look at the changes this woman went through.’ ”