Earlier this week my amazing grandmother, Pat Wild, sent me an email about the late cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who has been honored with his own postage stamp. A few days later I was corresponding with a lovely pixel pal of mine, a distant relative named Annie Richtel, and she also told me about the Bill Mauldin stamp. The coincidence made me take notice. Apparently Mauldin was a World War 2 infantryman and cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for the U.S. military that is still in publication. Since he was drawing from the trenches, so to speak, his perspective on the hardships of war was very specific- he knew exactly what his readers were going through. And they loved him for it.
OK, the crazy thing is that this stamp came out over a year ago but these two women, who don’t know eachother, both brought it to my attention this week. I would never have paid attention to Bill Mauldin and his stamp if I didn’t correspond with people who are of his generation. And the association is even closer for Annie. One of Mauldin’s recurring cartoon characters was modelled after a soldier named Irving Richtel, her brother in law.
Even though I love receiving paper mail from my grandmother (usually carefully cut out clippings from her local newspaper) I am so impressed with her for embracing email. While my grandfather continued to use his typewriter until his death last year, Grandma made the digital transition for herself and her peers years ago. She started a computers for seniors program on Cape Cod that was a huge success and she is now developing a program to encourage seniors to use social networking to offset their isolation. Annie, who is 94 years old, seems pleased as punch to be corresponding by email. Perhaps she has been influenced by (or has influenced) her grandson, Matt Richtel, a technology writer for the New York Times. This experience has made me even more committed to inter-generational correspondence, in any medium that works.
Annie and Pat, when I am your age I hope to be as receptive to new technologies as you two are. I also hope my grandchildren reply promptly to my paper mail.
