From New York to Sandpoint, the long way ’round

Sandpoint local Alan Ball receives a postcard — 72 years late

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Most Sandpointians will recognize the name Alan Ball — whether from his time at the Gardenia Center, his performances with the Singer’s Dozen or from the Bonner General Health emergency room. He’s been a beloved member of the community for decades, and now the rest of the nation is catching on, launching Ball into stardom thanks to a late postal delivery.

The postman recently delivered Ball a postcard marked “return to sender” — 72 years after he dropped it in the mail in New York City. 

The memento from his high-school trip didn’t reach its destination of Ottawa, Ill. — or likely leave New York — until August 2025, when its arrival piqued the interest of the local postmaster. With the help of a few genealogists, the U.S. Postal Service managed to track down Ball and finally deliver the card.

Now an 88-year-old retired doctor, Ball recalls his 1953 trip as a “life-changing” experience. He’d worked for years mowing lawns and shoveling snow until he saved up enough money to visit his cousins and aunt at their coffee plantation in Puerto Rico. Ten years before the invention of the ZIP code, a trip like that meant taking the train from Illinois to New York, then hopping on a plane.

“I’d never been on a train,” Ball told the Reader. “And then I had to catch an airliner to Puerto Rico from New York — I’d never been on an airliner before, either. It was a propeller-driven thing.”

During his brief stop in the city, Ball visited the newly built United Nations headquarters and sent a quick postcard to his folks telling them he’d arrived safely. Little did he know that postcard would garner the interest of both The New York Times and CNN seven decades later.

“I took the airplane down to Puerto Rico overnight, which was really something because I had a window seat in the airplane and here was the engine spewing out these gold and blue flames,” said Ball. “As I was watching it, it kind of made me sad. I was thinking, ‘These engines have to do all that work. They’re working all night long and here I am.’”

Years later, Ball would find himself on a similar path, working through the night in the ER; but, back then, he was just the sheltered son of an Illinois Methodist preacher about to experience another culture for the first time.

“It changed my life, seeing how other people live in other cultures and how there’s really no difference between them and ourselves,” said Ball. “They just happen to live in a different spot and have different traditions and languages.”

Over that summer vacation, he learned three crucial things: to accept everyone as they are; to see that, deep down, “everybody is nice”; and that Puerto Rican horses speak Spanish. He then went off to college and met the love of his life, Jeanie Ball, before dropping out and heading to Alaska, where he worked on the railroad, fixed and invented electronics, panned for gold and successfully earned his pilot’s license from a con artist. Eventually, by accident, he ended up in medical school.

“I thought, ‘Well, I could do that,’” he said — “that” being a charter member of the American College of Emergency Physicians, a then up-and-coming medical field.

“It was something that was fun, you know. I liked being an ER doc,” said Ball. “I never knew what was coming in the door, and it was always OK, because I might not know everything about it, but I probably know more than the person who came in the door.”

Ball has plenty of tales from his time practicing in Iowa and Idaho, where he made friends with every patient, nurse and doctor that crossed his path.

“One thing about the emergency room is not only that it’s new every few minutes, but you get to see life from another side,” said Ball. “You get to talking to them when you’re working with them — usually, unless they’re unconscious.”

He remembers one particular patient — a little girl who was having trouble breathing — that earned him an unlikely friend: her gun-toting father.

“The poor guy, he was just so scared,” said Ball. “He pulled a gun out and he said, ‘Doc, you better save my daughter.’ I looked at him and I kind of smiled to myself. I said, ‘You know, if you shoot me, then I can’t take care of your daughter.’ So he backed off.”

“That’d be pretty frightening for a parent,” he added. “You don’t know if your baby’s dying or not. So I can understand why he would be upset. You’ve got to see the world from somebody else’s eyes.”

Despite three near-death experiences, Ball has spent his days laughing, painting, playing piano, singing, landscaping and caring for dozens of wild pets over the years, including a crow, opossum, raccoon, mole and bat.

“[There are] lots of expanding experiences in a person’s life — not just mine, but everyone’s — if you’re paying attention to what’s happening around you and are ready to accept it,” said Ball.

Clearly, life isn’t done with him yet, sending him on yet another adventure in the form of a faded postcard with a two-cent stamp like a one-way ticket down memory lane.

“It kind of struck me that, when they were trying to find my folks in Ottawa, nobody knew who they had been,” said Ball. “Our legacy doesn’t last very long locally, or any place. Nobody knew who I was, nobody knew my father, and it didn’t matter.”

Maybe “nobody” knew who he was then — at least in Ottawa — but now it seems that half the U.S. knows his name. Whether in Idaho, Iowa or Illinois, the ongoing story of Alan Ball won’t be forgotten anytime soon.