Couple reunited with lost 43-year-old letter

A suburban couple was reunited with a lost love letter from 1967, after a woman discovered the note flying through her yard on Easter Sunday.

Eugene Mudgett of Homer Glen was cleaning his garage the Friday prior and didn't realize he lost the letter he wrote to his then-fiancee, Janet, while serving in Vietnam.

"It was a very windy day, and I thought I had it in a bag with other important items I took inside, but it must have slipped away, and I didn't even know," he said.

Two days later the wind swept the letter into the backyard of fellow Homer Glen resident Callie Coventry, while she and her boyfriend, Leo Matalas, cooked outdoors on the warm holiday. The couples live a quarter-mile apart.

They spotted the aging piece of paper blowing high in the air toward their grill. After catching it, Coventry saw it was a love poem sent by Mudgett to Janet Adamkiewicz, his wife's maiden name.

Mudgett said he initially entered the poem in a contest for the Stars and Stripes military newspaper.

"I didn't win and it was sent back to me, but I thought it will mean something to somebody," he said, "so I thought I'd send it to the person I actually wrote it for."

The letter revealed no addresses or hometowns, so Coventry questioned neighbors and searched the Internet for the owners. She quickly hit a dead end.

But when the Daily Herald posted an article online about her dilemma Thursday, readers from throughout the suburbs and even in Canada joined the hunt. They submitted names of Mudgetts from Illinois suburbs all the way out to California.

But it was a family friend from Bartlett, Michael Kowalewski, who finally recognized the couple. His mother attended high school with Janet and was a bridesmaid in their July 1967 wedding.

He said it was funny to see the couple's story causing such a stir.

"Just reading it and actually knowing someone in the article was so weird," Kowalewski said in an e-mail.

Coventry hand-delivered the letter Thursday, taking the Mudgetts by surprise. She was happy to get it back to its owners, she said, and was lucky to find it Sunday before heavy rain began.

"It was making me sad to think they might have lost a piece of history," she said.