Nut Mail Filed Away in Trash Bin of History
End-of-an-era this, end-of-an-era that . . . Is there no end to the ends of life-as-it-was-lived-before?
We’ve witnessed the last of the last-minute dash to the plane, the demise of terrorism jokes, the coda to Americans who can only mumble their way through the national anthem.
And now, a fine tradition of journalism has passed into history. Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence, please, in memory of . . . the nut letter.
When I went to retrieve my mail, there it hung, the list of FBI guidelines for identifying worrisome mail, among them:
NO return address . . . possibly mailed from a foreign country . . . excessive postage . . . restrictive markings like “personal” or “special delivery” . . . addressed to a title rather than an individual . . . badly typed or written . . . excessive tape or string.
The FBI calls it “suspicious mail.” In newsrooms across the country, it’s called “nut mail” and, until now--until its destination became the trash bin and not the mail slot--it’s been one of the diversions of the craft.
Through the public post, we in this scribbler’s trade have always found nut mail good for amusing moments, sad and instructive ones and, once in a while, a real fright.
Even before you learn the managing editor’s first name, you learn to spot nut mail: Obsessively tiny handwriting. Headlines cut out and assembled on a sheet of paper like ransom notes in noir movies. Your own story, snipped out of the paper and scrawled with insults all the way around the edges.
A dozen nut letters have come my way from inventors of perpetual motion machines who needed only publicity from me to make us both rich, and from people proving, absolutely once and for all, that Einstein was (pick one) a myth/a Commie/a space alien/wrong about everything.
Judging from the mail, in every single prison cell in California there dwells an innocent man. And many of those men (and sometimes, quite touchingly, their mothers, who write their own long and impassioned letters) guarantee me that there is a Pulitzer Prize to be won by the reporter who brings his injustices before the American public. (That is the case for keeping the nut mail coming: because once in a while, someone is framed, someone is ripped off.)
In time, you cultivate a connoisseur’s eye. The crude, vulgar, vicious, even racist hate mail is unworthy of the name nut mail, possessing no refinement or style. It is the writer detailing with exquisite, solemn delusion exactly how Congress is using magnets to torment him so the world will never learn that he is FDR’s love child and heir who deserves nut-mail honors.
Letters have found their way to me from a woman who swore she was Spiro Agnew’s true widow denied her rights in a government cover-up, and from men who read my article on the 1947 Black Dahlia murder and wanted to confess to the crime--even though they hadn’t even been born when it was committed.
Readers have written vehemently about the parlous state of my soul, if I even have one, and of that they have serious doubts. One or two sent pictures of aborted fetuses and wrote, “Wish this was you.” One reader, of the Hemingway school of spare prose, wrote: “I hope you dye.”
Instructive as e-mail can be, it can never match nut mail’s idiosyncrasies.
An end to nut mail means an end to the fun of answering some of them. I quite enjoyed correcting all the errors in red ink and returning the letters to the sender, with a grade.
To the letter ranting that I was responsible for the end of Western civilization, I wrote back earnestly: “Western civilization? All by myself? I admit to dreaming of leaving some legacy, but I’m overwhelmed! All I can say is, ‘Thank you’!”
That was one nut I never heard from again.
Among my journo-pals’ favorites:
* The Swedish man’s 3,000-word article extolling the charms of a nonexistent country; he sent it to the foreign desk because he “can’t trust your travel section.”
* The weekly epic poems about Jesus.
* L.A.’s own Prophet Joseph, who predicted the trivial and the mundane--”I foresee a couple kissing at the zoo . . . I predict someone will get hit by a car”--and then sent another letter congratulating himself, writing, “FULFILLED!”
* The San Bernardino man whose fake addresses and disguised handwriting are so clumsy and transparent that my friend calls him mockingly “the CIA,” as in, “Ho, hum, another letter from the CIA.”
Adios, nut mail. Terrorism has claimed one more victim.
*
Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
