SANTA CLAUS PASSES

Taranaki Daily News, 17 August 1935, Page 19 (Supplement)

SANTA CLAUS PASSES

STORY OF HIS BIG LETTER BAG. THE POOR RICH MAN. Santa Claus has passed by, leaving his mantle behind. For 28 years he wore it invisibly about his shoulders at a small post office near the place of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood in Indiana. There they knew him as James Martin, the village postmaster who kept the store and sold anything from umbrellas to axes. But throughout America and beyond there are half a million children who never saw the old man yet believed in him as Santa Claus. He answered their Christmas letters. Before he was born the name of his backwoods hamlet was changed from Santa Fe to Santa Claus, and perhaps that gave him the idea. He sent out letters stamped with the post-mark Santa Claus, and that gave other people the idea also. When children asked their parents if there really was a Santa Claus their mother or father would write to Mr. Martin asking him to send a letter back with the magic words Santa Claus on it. Who could doubt them? No well-brought-up child. So, year by year, the letters to Santa Claus increased. Only 75 people live in the village, but at Christmas-time letters arrived by tens of thousands, with all manner of addresses to which Mr. Martin was to send a letter back with Santa Claus stamped on it.

Mr. Martin had no reindeer sledge, no magic sack from which to bring out gifts for them, but he could not bear to see children disappointed, and if they asked for a letter he would answer it. For gifts he appealed to kindly people and institutions wh'o might afford them, and he acted as their Christmas almoner, Three years ago some Government department without a soul suggested that the Santa Claus post office should be closed to save expense.

Martin’s fight against this cruel economy was backed by hundreds of persons, and he was allowed to carry on till he died. One of the astonishing things about this unrewarded benefactor was that for some years, poor though he was, he spent £5O put of his own pocket to pay for clerks to re-address the letters, which had passed the half-million mark.

Of such a man we 'hardly like to say he has passed on, so fragrant a memory, so powerful a legend, has he left behind. We will rather say that Santa Claus has passed by.