Labor of Loveland: Helping Cupid Via Special Delivery

Every year around this time, Colorado’s “Sweetheart City” is transformed into an assembly line of love.

Dozens of volunteers file into the local visitors center, take their seats in a long row and begin the careful task of sorting through thousands of letters, hand-stamping them with a cowboy cupid and a poem, and then sending them on their way with the official Loveland postmark.

“The condition of the world can be measured by our Valentine program,” postmaster Perry Buck said. “You can tell how much love is in the world.”

This year, the volunteers expect to process nearly a quarter of a million Valentines. In the program’s 54-year existence, volunteers say, they have processed cards from 104 countries and every continent. The cards arrive in larger envelopes, then are sorted and sent with a Loveland postmark.

To the sorters, stampers and mailers, what started out as a promotional gimmick has become a labor of love.

“You just kind of feel if you’re going to do something, you want to do it the best way,” said volunteer Betty Hurder, 72.

The no-charge Valentine re-mailing program began just after World War II when then-Chamber of Commerce President Ted Thompson persuaded Loveland’s postmaster to start stamping letters from the “Sweetheart Town.”

The city of 45,000 about 45 miles north of Denver was named for W.A.H. Loveland, the president of a railroad company, but the modern volunteers prefer to promote the city’s first four letters: “Love.”

In one letter, a man from China added a special note to the volunteers asking them to add their own note to his sweetheart to help him plead his case.

Another man who had been married for 40 years wrote that he sent his first Valentine to his wife through their program.

The stamped verse changes year to year. This year’s, penned by Loveland resident Teresa Boynton, reads: “From the gateway to the great Rocky Mountains/Under skies of magnificent blue/Dan Cupid sends Valentine greetings/ Directly from Loveland to you.”

As letter sorter Barbara Noose, 71, explained it: “It brings special meaning to their message of love.”

https://www.loveland.org/valentine/