The envelope was yellowed, and the pencil marks were fading, but the message inside remained clear: a half-century-old dispatch written in the careful hand of a Fay fourth grader. 

On January 23, Alex Suárez ’81 finally read the letter he had mailed to himself in 1976. In it, his nine-year-old self commemorated the 200th anniversary of General Henry Knox’s 1776 trek through Southborough, a mission to deliver the captured British artillery that eventually liberated Boston.

The letter started as a classroom assignment from fourth grade teacher Sara Stockwell. To bring the history of General Henry Knox’s march through Southborough to life, she asked her students to write letters to their future selves about the event. The finishing touch? A trip to the post office to secure a special commemorative stamp cancellation, ensuring their letters would be officially marked by history. 

At the time, Alex was the only fourth grade boarding student at Fay. He recalls that his mother was in medical residency at the time and had convinced “someone at Fay” to take him as a boarder, even though the boarding program didn’t start until fifth grade. 

Now retired and living in Texas, Alex came across his unopened letter from Fay several years ago, in a collection of childhood memorabilia that had survived multiple moves. He decided that if it had survived thus far, he would wait until the 50th anniversary of its mailing to open it. 

What he found inside felt like a time capsule. “I found my spelling and grammar errors to be quaint,” Alex noted, also marveling at the 13-cent first-class stamp. He was most surprised, however, by the tenacity of the U.S. Postal Service. “I’m impressed the letter ever made it to my mother’s apartment,” he said. “It wasn’t addressed to her last name, which is different from mine, and it lacked both an apartment number and a zip code!” 

Alex’s time at Fay was an experiment that lasted only a year, and his mother ultimately decided he was too young to board after all. However, he still has vivid memories of his alcove dorm room in Old Main, eating meals in the Dining Room, weekend Jeep trips through the dunes of Cape Cod, and the kindness of his dorm parents, Mr. and Mrs. Parsons, the latter of whom would bake fresh bread for the boys to make boarding life feel a little bit more like home. It turns out that Alex’s letter delivered more than just an artifact of history: it reunited him with a version of himself he hadn’t heard from in fifty years!