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Mystery Solved!

The mystery started when Karen and Rob Ryder found a letter on their front steps. They hadn’t seen it until their neighbor Karl Kaufmann texted them that it was lying there.

What they found was a yellowing envelope that had been mailed on March 8—but not March 8, 2021. The cancellation date was March 8, 1955. The letter had not even been mailed in Connecticut; it had been sent from Ann Arbor, Michigan, by a University of Michigan student named Lance Minor. He addressed it to his parents, the L.C. Minors in Birmingham, Michigan.

How had it gotten to the Ryder’s doorstep in Ivoryton?

The letter had no clues. Lance wrote about his birthday, which was on March 8. He thanked his parents for the check for $90, which would help with his plans to go to Florida and admitted that his birthday cake tasted so good he hadn’t shared any with his roommates.

He signed off with kind words for the whole family. “I’m a mighty lucky young man to have such a wonderful mother, father and sister,” he wrote, and then added his brother to that list: “Bill included.”

Karen did some Internet research. She found a Lancelot Minor who had lived in Birmingham, Michigan and a Dorothy Minor listed more recently in Connecticut. There was a telephone number for Dorothy Minor that indicated Chester, however, the number no longer worked.

Beyond those scant details, there were no clues but Karen Ryder had an idea that might lead to more information. She wrote a letter to the editor of the Valley Courier.

“I thought someone who might have known Dorothy Minor would read it and maybe respond,” she said.

She could not have anticipated where the response would have come from.

The editor at Shore Publishing, which publishes the Valley Courier along with six other papers along the shoreline, assigned this reporter to find out what she could about the mystery. And that was the serendipity moment that led to the solution.

Sitting around the dining room table talking to the Ryders, the reporter realized something incredibly unlikely: Though she had never met the Karen and Rob Ryder before and knew nothing of the letter until they showed it to her, she realized she knew much of the letter’s story.

This reporter was a friend of the late Emily Roberts, who died in 2018. She recalled Emily’s obituary; her father’s name had stuck in the reporter’s mind because it was somewhat unusual: Lancelot. And she thought she remembered that Emily’s maiden name was Minor.

She found Emily Roberts’ obituary online and her father’s name was indeed Lancelot Minor from Birmingham, Michigan.

The Ryders hadn’t known Emily Roberts, but they knew about her husband Doug Roberts, a retired National Hockey League player and longtime hockey coach at Connecticut College. They also knew Emily and Doug Robert’s daughter, Doree Roberts Wilcox. She and her husband Jason live around the corner from them.

A call to Roberts Wilcox confirmed that the L.C. Minors, to whom the letter was addressed, were her grandparents, Lancelot and Dorothy Minor. After her grandfather died, her grandmother moved from Michigan to Chester Village West before she died 2015 at the age of 101.

The letter had special significance for Roberts Wilcox. Her mother and Lance were nine years apart but born on the same day. March 8 had also been Emily Robert’s birthday.

In a recent telephone call, Lance Minor, now 88 and living in New Canaan, called the coincidences that led to identifying the provenance of the letter “amazing.”

But there was another point he wanted to make: “You can see what a loving family we were. I was very lucky,” he said.

Dorothy Minor’s memorabilia is now stored at Doug Roberts’ house in Old Lyme and Doree Roberts Wilcox had been helping him organize the material. She had brought some over to her house to sort through. She remembered a cardboard carton without a cover in her car.

Sometimes she parks next to the Ryder’s house to hike in the Bushy Hill Nature Preserve, which abuts their property. She thinks a car window must have been open and the letter blown out.

There are still some questions left. Rob Ryder noted the letter had been firmly wedged between the stone steps of their front door.

“Someone must have found it and put it there,” he says.

But who was that person? That part of the mystery remains.

There is one more thing about that letter that’s worth noting. It was sent with a first class stamp 66 years ago. The cost in 1955? Three cents.