Shedd Aquarium postcard arrives 53 years later

“We’ll probably be home before this gets there!”

Those were the words teenager Scott McMurry’s mom scrawled across the top of a postcard from Chicago in the summer of 1958.

She didn’t know how right she was.

The postcard depicting the Shedd Aquarium finally arrived at McMurry’s Virginia home on Tuesday – 53 years after his mom mailed it.

“I recognized my mother’s handwriting immediately,” said McMurry, now 71. “It’s incredible.”

Now the Shedd Aquarium has offered to give him a tour of the attraction his late parents visited more than half a century ago.

“Hopefully I’ll be able to come next week,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

The postcard was addressed to Clairmont Ave. in Decatur, Ga., – where McMurry grew up. But last week it showed up in Elizabeth Fulcher’s mailbox on Clairmont Lane in South Daytona, Fla.

Fulcher realized something was strange when she saw the 2 cent stamp in the top right corner.

She posted a picture of the postcard on Facebook, and her friends helped track down McMurry, a historian with the Justice Department.

“Without the Internet, I’d never have received it,” McMurry said.

Just why the snail mail took so long to arrive remains a mystery, but an April 2012 Michigan postmark suggests it was recently mailed a second time, McMurry said.