89 Million Missent Missives Contain Drugs, Money, Bibles : Not Quite Letter-Perfect, Post Office Gathers Mountains of Stray Mail

PHILADELPHIA —  No, the Christmas package you sent your relatives wasn’t sucked into a black hole in space. No, the post card from Hawaii wasn’t carried out to sea. And, no, the bill the telephone company sent a month ago wasn’t chewed up by a dog.

They’re probably in Philadelphia.

Just across the street from the 30th Street Train Station, in the main Philadelphia Post Office, is a room the size of a basketball court where all the lost letters and packages from the Washington metropolitan area, and 11 states, end up.

It is one of seven such rooms in the country where U.S. Postal Service clerks are allowed to open your mail.

What they find can only be described as a commentary on the curious state of American life: Bibles, drugs, dirty clothes, mortgages and insurance policies, scraps of food in plastic containers and lots of odd containers--peanut tins, coffee jars and plastic pill bottles--filled with pennies. Nationwide, about $872,000 in cash was taken out of undeliverable letters and put into the Postal Service coffers last year.

Completely Blank

It’s no wonder why much of the mail arrives at the Philadelphia office: Millions of the envelopes here have no street address, or the city or state has been left off. Some are addressed in a foreign language and others are completely blank.

The most common error, postal officials said, is incorrect address and no return address.

“You’d like to return their mail, you’d like to return their check,” said clerk Gerard Insall, as he ripped open greeting cards and threw them one after another in the trash can at his feet. “You feel bad when you can’t return a Mother’s Day card, a Father’s Day card, their bills. It doesn’t seem to end.”

About 89 million letters and packages were lost last year, according to the Postal Service. Thirty percent of those were eventually delivered or returned.

Clerk Pearl Banks receives about 150 mail tracer requests each day. She spends half her day hunting down the items people list on the forms. “I don’t find something every day, but there’s other people looking,” she said. “Last time I found something was a couple of months ago.”

Postal clerks in Philadelphia and the other six offices discard bulk business mail and post cards with the wrong addresses, no forwarding addresses, and no return addresses. They also throw away correspondence that contains no identifying addresses inside. That means thousands of Christmas cards.

More Than $20

Cash and items worth $20 or more are recorded and saved for 90 days. If an item is not claimed--either through a tracer form available at post offices, or a phone call or letter describing it--it is kept by the Postal Service. Items worth more than $500 go directly to the New York dead-letter office for storage.

Once every several months, the Philadelphia office auctions off unclaimed items such as cameras, television sets and figurines. It gives perishable foods, toys and used clothing to local charities. Unclaimed valuables such as credit cards are shredded.

The journey to the dead-letter office starts at the local post office, where the mail carrier collects incomplete and undeliverable letters and sends them to a regional mail processing center. Such letters from Northern Virginia, for example, end up in Phil Heine’s hands.

Heine is a “nixie” clerk at the huge Northern Virginia processing center at Merrifield. For eight hours a day he tries to determine things such as what one sender meant when he wrote “Gilboa, W.V.” on an envelope. He’s not allowed to open a letter, so he’s left with few clues.

“You’ve got to know how to read the writing, or know the town with no state,” said Heine. “As long as we have a town and a street, we’re supposed to deliver it.”

It is not only individuals who are responsible for the volume of letters that arrive here.

Phone Company Mistake

Heine displayed hundreds of telephone bills with no address in the cut-out envelope window.

On Oct. 14 the Internal Revenue Service sent a letter to someone, somewhere in Pennsylvania.

The unopened letter came back to the mail carrier with “person no longer at this address” written on it.

The IRS had no return address in the left-hand corner. Three months later, on Jan. 13, the letter made its way to the Philadelphia dead-letter office, where a clerk opened it and found a return address.

“I say to myself, why don’t they put their name on it,” said clerk Mary Jackson.

“I really think they should be more careful,” she said.