Daughter Seeks Home For Her Mother's Thousands Of Christmas Cards From 1960s
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A Northwest Indiana woman is looking for a home for her mother's Christmas card collection.
The collection contains tens of thousands of cards from the 1960s from everyday people, celebrities, politicians and a pope - all mailed to one woman because her husband asked. WBBM's Steve Miller reports.
It was a simple request in the mid-1960s, published in the paper, then picked up by the wire service. A man in Gary asked that people send Christmas cards to his wife, who was deaf.
And people responded. She received more than 80,000 cards.
"Oh my gosh. Can I count that high?" said the couple's only child, Tami Reynolds. "It had to be 80-90-thousand, easily."
The woman received cards from people like Joan Crawford, Jimmy Durante, and Ronald Reagan.
"We've got three or four from Elvis Presley. We've got Lady Bird Johnson and Lyndon Johnson, The Kennedys," Reynolds said.
But Reynolds said out of all those, her mother had a favorite.
"There was a young private in the Army. He was stationed in Germany and he couldn't get into the city to get a card. So he tore the lid off of a ration box and drew a Christmas card," she said.
Reynolds, who's 54, wants to make sure that eventually someone will get the collection who will appreciate it.
"The monetary value is not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for someone to take care of it," she said.
"Because right now it's just sitting in a tub, two tubs, actually, in my basement. And nobody but me is appreciating it."
