Requiem for the Aerogram

 

One of the aerograms we sent
 home. The top third was the front
when folded, the middle third
the back and the bottom third
was folded up inside. 

Alas, following in the tradition of dinosaurs, dodo birds, and 15 cent hamburgers, the aerogram is with us no more. What’s was an aerogram? It was a one page, pregummed, lick to seal, foldable, very lightweight, always colored blue, stamped with prepaid postage piece of paper specifically designed and accepted for international airmail. Starting very early in our time in Thailand, we would make regular trips to the Post Office and buy aerograms by the dozens. Hand written, sometimes typed for formal occasions, and later, printed on dot matrix printers off of floppy disc powered computers, aerograms were our main form of communication back to the US. At least for us and likely everyone, e-mail and the instant communication it enabled, ushered in the extinction of the aerogram.

I can’t say that I miss the aerogram but it certainly kept us busy. Whether writing to family, churches, individual church members, mission committees or our mission headquarters in Valley Forge we would reach for a blank aerogram and fill it up with the verbiage of the day. Occasionally, if we had a lot to say or if we wanted to send something like a photo, we would have to use a regular envelope and pages of paper. But the cost of airmail increased with the weight of the letter so multiple page letters weren’t encouraged.

During our first term in Thailand (late 1982 – mid 1987) we had no TV as I don’t think there was much if any, English language content and we wouldn’t have understood the Thai. Even among the Thai and tribal people we worked with, TV did not seem very common. So, since TV was not really available and no one we knew had a set, we didn’t really miss it. By our second term which started in mid 1988, we could get VHS videos of movies in English so we started watching TV then. That was nice as video cartoons would keep Sean entertained as a baby and toddler.

So with no TV, our routine while in language study was to go to the school a half day, study Thai at our apartment in the afternoon as much as we could tolerate, then write letters in the evening. Along with no TV, we also had no air conditioning. We did use fans though, so it was always a challenge to weigh down the lightweight aerograms enough to prevent them from blowing around the room. The air, and therefore we, were also very sticky so it was also hard not to move an arm or any appendage without sticking to an aerogram or two.

The flip side was all available 
to write on, hopefully with
better penmanship than me.

Since our earliest days of mission training, we were encouraged, commanded, coerced, convinced or cudgeled into accepting the need and desire to communicate back to the US. We were still in the days of the “missionary newsletter”. So, we would write up the text of a newsletter and send it and any photo or two we might want included by airmail to our mission headquarters in Valley Forge. “Valley Forge” then, would format and print the newsletters and made them look nice and professional. Depending on the year, the budget and who was in charge though, we were generally told that as a group we missionaries weren’t sending enough newsletters. Sometimes though, we were told we were sending too many. Sometimes we were sending too many photos, sometimes not enough. It was a little hard to always know just what was wanted at any given time.

Most of our letter writing though, was to whoever wrote to us. If we received a letter or a card we tried to write back. Of course, there was also family correspondence along with the rest. For a long time, we recorded in a notebook who wrote to us so we could see if we had replied and to keep track of addresses so we could make up newsletter mailing lists. But as computers came on the scene, the mailing lists took on a different form. With or without computers though, we worked hard on the communication side of things and I hope we held up our side of the “bargain”.

I believe the US stopped selling aerograms in 1999. Likewise, I believe the Thai “Aerogramme” is no longer available. My (Duane’s) mother saved many of the letters we wrote home so we have a pile of aerograms to look back on and remember some of our early days in Thailand and to serve as fuel for these posts and stories.