1960 Doris Ridgway Route 1 Hardy Virginia Walter Locbl

Description

Featured here is a postcard addressed to
Doris Ridgway
Route 1
Hardy, Virginia
Below is the story about this little girl
The earliest example of an actual appeal to help a despairing child occurred in 1960 when Walter Locbl, an avid stamp collector in Roanoke, Virginia. in the United States, heard of a girl. aged nine, by the name of Doris Ridgeway who is terminally ill with bone cancer and who liked to collect cards . The child was from a poor family, her father having deserted her mother. Locbl decided to help the child by publishing a request in a local newspaper, for people to send Christmas cards to the child. According to Locbl, who later documented the event in America!! Philatelist, The Journal of the American Philatelic Society, the request instantly caught the interest of the community. Sometime in December 1960, Locbl appeal was broadcast on a radio station in West Virginia. This request was the picked up by Allegany Airlines and transmitted by teletype to other airlines throughout the world. The teletype dispatch went as follows: A small girl is dying of bone cancer. She has expressed her last wish that she receive Christmas cards, lots of them. Her address is Doris Ridgeway Route 1, Hardy, Va. Take live minutes of your time and send her a card. Please make her last Christmas a happy one. This message was picked up and relayed to air force bases in the far east and was subsequently printed in the~~ The response was enormous and the child received over 600,000 Christmas cards from well-wishers throughout the world. The Post Office at Hardy, Virginia was overwhelmed with bags of mail for Little Doris.
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