A postcard mailed more than 70 years ago from the United Nations headquarters in New York has finally found its way home, closing a mystery decades in the making.

The card, postmarked June 17, 1953, was addressed to “Rev. F.E. Ball and family” in Ottawa, Illinois. But it never arrived—until it suddenly resurfaced at the Ottawa post office this August. Postal officials believe it had been misplaced at the UN for the past 72 years before being rediscovered and sent out.By then, the Ball family no longer lived at the address.

Ottawa’s postmaster, Mark Thompson, refused to let the artifact be lost again. He reached out to the community, and soon local reporters, genealogists, and volunteers at the LaSalle County Genealogy Guild joined the hunt.

Their research pointed to Dr. Alan Ball, now 88 and living in Sandpoint, Idaho.Ball had been just 16 years old when he mailed the postcard during a stopover in New York. He was en route to Puerto Rico, where he planned to spend the summer with his Aunt Mary on her coffee plantation. He had saved for years by mowing lawns and shoveling snow to afford the trip, describing it later as his first true step into adulthood.

The postcard, which simply let his parents know he had made it as far as New York, never reached them. Instead, it remained in limbo for decades.

Last week, Ball finally received the long-lost message, delivered with a smile from a Sandpoint postal worker who told him, “Sorry it’s so late.”Ball laughed at the surreal twist, saying it was astonishing to hold a card he had written as a teenager. Thanks to a postmaster’s persistence and a team of genealogists, the postcard’s journey—spanning more than 2,500 miles and seven decades—was finally complete.Credit: CNN NewsourceExplore: NBCPalmSprings.com, where we are connecting the Valley.