The Baltimore Sun
Franklin Kelly, a curator at the National Gallery of Art, knew something was wrong the moment he saw the yellowed envelope in his mailbox.
Inside, he found that color slides of 18th-century oil paintings he had been eagerly awaiting were warped and bubbly. "They were nuked," he says.
And he was one of the lucky ones. A colleague’s color transparency arrived so badly deformed that it "looked like someone had poured molasses on it and then slapped it in a George Foreman grill."
After months of delay, batches of irradiated mail are trickling back to government employees. But some are finding platinum credit cards stained the color of coffee, snapshots singed, magazines fused shut and floppy disks wiped clean by the powerful electron beams that were intended only to kill anthrax and other biological poisons.
The cooked correspondence offers a glimpse of what some Americans might encounter in the months ahead. Since October, the U.S. Postal Service has been trucking mail addressed to Washington, D.C., federal agencies to Ohio and New Jersey for sterilization by two private companies. Soon, the agency plans to install eight electron-beam machines in mail-processing centers. For security reasons, postal officials won’t say where the $5 million devices will go, but the Postal Service is likely to widen the irradiation beyond Washington.
Anecdotal damage reports of irradiated mail to date show that yellowed mail is common, but damage appears to be rare. "It’s hit or miss," says Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president of the Direct Marketing Association, which represents catalog retailers and other bulk mailers.
Typical of the kind of mail people are getting is what Arthur Wheelock, an art professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, found in his mailbox recently: a seminar paper mailed by a graduate student last fall that’s so yellowed it "looks like she wrote it in 1903," he says. But otherwise, he says, it’s perfectly legible.
There’s little doubt the electron beams are potent. The mail at one of the companies irradiating for the Postal Service got so hot last month that it caught fire.
But though the damaged mail poses problems for some, others are scrambling to collect it.
As soon as she noticed irradiated mail arriving at the National Gallery, Connie McCabe fired off an e-mail begging colleagues not to toss it. "The funny thing about conservators is they find deterioration fascinating," said McCabe, a photo conservator at the museum, adding that this is a rare opportunity to study how materials she works with react to electron beams.
The National Postal Museum in Washington, meanwhile, is keeping an eye out for display-quality examples of zapped mail. Among the items it has set aside is an irradiated bag of microwave popcorn — which made it through slightly singed but without a kernel popped, said Ted Wilson, chairman of the museum’s collections committee.
The museum has competition from stamp collectors, many of whom are rushing to get their hands on anything stamped "irradiated," as some post offices have been doing.
"This is the kind of thing that collectors just jump on with both feet," said Michael Laurence, editor of Linn’s Stamp News, a weekly newspaper for philatelists in Sidney, Ohio. "I would certainly pay 15, 20, 25 bucks just to have one."
Irradiated mail, he says, is part of a long tradition dating back to the days when people fumigated their letters to kill yellow fever and other diseases.
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