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'Who Was This Man Behind the Pen?'

February 02, 2010 - MADISON -- For most of her adult life, Sheila Kilkenny had a mysterious friend whom she never got to meet.

The friend was Postcard Jack.

Jack was a world traveler who, over the course of three decades beginning in 1979, mailed postcards from all over the world to the Oasis Restaurant on Main Street.

Thousands of postcards, sometimes as many as 100 in a single month, were sent to Kilkenny's mother, Mary Dwelley, who owned and operated the eatery, where Kilkenny and her three sisters worked. Postmarks were from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Australia and all over the United States.

Even after Dwelley sold the place in 1995, the postcards kept coming. Dwelley passed away in 2004 at the age of 81, going to her reward never knowing who Postcard Jack was.

The mystery of Postcard Jack was revealed earlier this month when Bill Garbarino, of Newtown, Conn., called the Morning Sentinel to say his brother Jack -- Postcard Jack -- had died.

John "Jack" Garbarino died Dec. 15 in New York City. He was 67.

"I was shocked -- I'm still in shock," Kilkenny said this past week as she pored over thousands of postcards from a man who had come to feel like a family friend.

Jack died of complications from diabetes and kidney failure, his brother said.

Although he visited the restaurant, now called River's Edge, several times over the years, he never revealed his identity.

A management consultant with ITT, Dun & Bradstreet and McKinsey & Co., Postcard Jack sent an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 postcards from all over the world to the restaurant, Bill Garbarino said.

Kilkenny, 56, still has more than 3,000 of them.

"It's been a great part of our life," she said. "It was something that made us smile and we always wanted to know who this friend was that sent us these wonderful cards from all over the world. It just intrigued us very much. When we found out that he had passed away we were all shocked."

As Bill Garbarino tells the story, the whole postcard thing started on a bet in the fall of 1979.

The Garbarinos have a camp on Hancock Pond in North New Portland and the boys would visit the Oasis, Bill Garbarino said. They saw postcards displayed around the mirror above the bar and decided to have a contest.

The idea behind the contest was to see which brother could send the most postcards to the Oasis, with a strict set of rules, including keeping a record of the postcards that were sent.

Jack won the bet and kept sending postcards, right up until August 2009. At one point, he even had a rubber stamp made with the Oasis' address on it. He could not pass a post office without sending off a postcard, his brother said.

Jack's son, Michael, likened his dad to a rogue adventurer, part Zorro, part Riddler.

Kilkenny said Postcard Jack became such a part of her family over the years that her niece, Robyn Hubbard Belanger, a school teacher in Brunswick, made a DVD called "The Mystery of Postcard Jack: In Memory of Gram Dwelley."

"Can you imagine the excitement I used to have when I'd lunge through the front door of the restaurant only to find Gram and beg her to show me her latest card?" Belanger says in the DVD voice-over, which includes piano music and photographs. "Gram always waited patiently for her next correspondence and yet the mystery still remained. Who was this man behind the pen?"

Even the postman who delivered many of the postcards had fun with the Postcard Jack mystique.

Letter carrier Bill Russakoff, 52, of Cornville, has been on the job 29 years. He said he took over the postal route that included the Oasis in 1984 at the peak of Jack's "impish streak," as his brother Bill put it.

"For the last 25 of those 30 years it has been me," Russakoff said. "I thought it was bizarre that somebody would be motivated to write hundreds of postcards. He would go on these campaigns -- some days there would be 10 or 12 a day and they would be numbered."

Russakoff said Postcard Jack never addressed anything to the mailman, but a couple of years, right around Christmas, he would send a tip for the letter carrier.

"He wrote with a flair and from all over the place and he always put a little air of mystery in his notes," he said.

Bert LaRose, the current owner of River's Edge, said he received about 30 postcards from Jack in the three years he and his wife, Linda, have owned the place. The last one came in August.

And there are couple of new postcard senders, he said.

Postcard Steve and Postcard Rod so far have sent six postcards from California, LaRose said.

Kilkenny said she remembers the time her brother, Bruce Hubbard, played a Postcard Jack trick on the family from Disney World in Florida.

"He knew how we were so anxious to find out who this person was," Kilkenny said. "He sent us a postcard and he signed Jack's name and said he had met my brother. My sister, she was so excited about it she called their motel room every 12 minutes to find out who he was, my brother said. They were just roaring with laughter down there because he sent the card, just to rattle us up, just to get us going.

"He didn't know Jack," she said. "Nobody knew Jack."

— By DOUG HARLOW Morning Sentinel January 31, 2010


Lakes: Hancock Pond
Regions: Embden


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