Lost letter with Biloxi postmark reunites teacher and student after 50 years

The handwritten letter from a former student to Virginia teacher Henry Wheeler was warm and chatty and included a request that Wheeler write a letter of reference to a college on his behalf.

The letter came into Wheeler’s possession only recently, almost 53 years after it was postmarked in Biloxi, Mississippi, in February 1967.

But it wasn’t the U.S. Postal Service’s fault. The letter, addressed to Wheeler at Douglas Freeman High School in Virginia, where he taught in the industrial arts department until his retirement in 1991, apparently had been delivered to the school and then lost for more than five decades, perhaps in a cabinet or drawer.

Somehow, the well-preserved, unopened envelope surfaced at the school in the fall.

One thing led to another, which led to another retired teacher who knew where to find the 88-year-old Wheeler, and the special delivery was made.

Wheeler recognized the name: William J. “Jerry” Williams ‘ but couldn’t recall the face. After all, he taught thousands of students over more than 30 years.

But utmost in his mind was this: “I thought, ‘What does he think of me?’ He wrote this very nice letter asking for my recommendation, and here I am 50 years later.”

No worries, says Jerry Williams. Everything worked out.

“To tell you the truth, I had actually forgotten about it,” Williams told the Richmond Times Dispatch newspaper.

But it all came back to him when Wheeler showed him the letter earlier this month at VFW Post 6364 in Henrico County in Virginia, where Wheeler and Williams reunited. They invited me along.

I became involved a week earlier when another Freeman alumnus, Bobby Grubbs, called to tell me about the letter after Wheeler had talked about it at a weekly lunch attended by friends with Freeman connections. At that point, no one had figured out any details about Williams or where he might be today.

A search of Ancestry.com turned up Freeman yearbooks from the 1960s and Williams, who was a 1966 graduate. A few clicks on Google led to a person of the same name in Hanover, which I shared with Wheeler, who placed a call.

When the phone rang, Wheeler saw an unfamiliar area code. Wheeler’s cell number traces to the few years he lived in North Carolina following retirement and he didn’t pick up. Then he listened to the voicemail.

“I heard the voice and thought, ‘I’ve heard this voice before,’” Williams said. “He sounds just the way he always sounded to me.”

Wheeler laughed. “North Carolina accent. I can’t shake it.”

Wheeler told Williams about the letter, got reacquainted and agreed to meet for lunch.

The VFW was an appropriate venue because both Wheeler and Williams are veterans. Wheeler served in the Navy: “When I was in school, I read a book about John Paul Jones and I was hooked,” he says. “I wanted to go to sea.”

Williams was in the Air Force, including a year in Vietnam.

When he wrote the letter to Wheeler, he was stationed at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, on the Gulf Coast.

While the letter was asking Wheeler to write a letter of reference to a college, it was not for admission. Williams said there was a college near the base, Gulf Park College for Women, and anyone from the base who wanted to date one of the students off-campus needed two letters of character reference.

Williams recalled going on a date or two. “They were all very nice, very polite,” he recalled, but the young women didn’t seem all that interested in the Air Force men, even though Wheeler didn’t come through for him.

“I was too late,” Wheeler said with a laugh.

Williams said he had written to Wheeler because he had been one of his favorite teachers.

“The thing that always made Henry Wheeler stand out in my mind was the empathy he had for all of us who were lucky enough to be his students,” said Williams, who had Wheeler for classes in mechanical drawing and architectural drawing. “He had a strong knowledge of drafting and was able to clearly impart this knowledge.

“Above all, however, I have not forgotten the respect showed me while I was his student.”

For a couple of hours over lunch, Wheeler and Williams reminisced about their Freeman days and caught up on where the 54 years have gone since Williams graduated.

After almost four years in the Air Force, where he was an aircraft electronic navigation aids technician, Williams built a career on his Air Force experience: for WWBT-TV, the city of Richmond and finally the Virginia State Police, where he worked in Northern Virginia in the telecommunications division. He retired in 2002.

Williams, 71, is still deeply involved with amateur radio, an interest that arose in his teen years when he obtained his ham radio license.

Wheeler went to work at Freeman in 1959, having been hired after impressing the school principal by using his welding skills to repair the principal’s snow chains during a storm. Over the years, he declined opportunities for administrative jobs because teaching was his first love.

His work with students has hardly gone unnoticed. In 2019, he was inducted as an honorary member into the American Institute of Architects in Virginia. Wheeler figures more than 350 of his students went on to work in architecture, engineering or some similar professions.

Keeping such a record of former students seems pretty indicative of a teacher Williams described as “very precise and meticulous.” Williams is not surprised that Wheeler felt compelled to find him after discovering a letter lost for more than 50 years.

“This reminds me how fortunate I was to have Henry as a teacher and recall the positive influence he had on my life,” he said.