The trip to my rural mailbox usually means lugging back an armful of catalogues, sales fliers and charity solicitations. I always hope there is at least one personal letter. Most of the mail is addressed to my wife. Recently she decided to end the clutter by canceling all the catalogues directed to her.

She found a Web site where you do this online. Since then there has been a slight decrease in the number of catalogues, but I noticed an increase in the number of charity solicitations. I consider it all junk mail and that brings me to the reason for this column. My grandson, Adam, was surfing the Internet and found a story about me in the Boca Raton (Florida) News, dated July 19, 1972.

Subject: Junk mail.

I had written a story for a California daily newspaper where I worked as a reporter, about the thousands of pieces of junk mail my wife and I had received within a year after our son, Jeffrey Michael, was born in August of 1971. Being an enterprising reporter, I noticed the increase in mail that I could directly trace to his birth and kept track of it for a story I wrote on junk mail.

I noted in the story that when our first child, a daughter, was born 20 years before, we received one piece of mail related to her birth, a postcard from a local shoe store offering a 10 percent discount on her first pair of shoes. The avalanche of mail that followed Jeffrey's birth could be traced directly to a short birth announcement in the newspaper.

I know that, because several included a plastic sealed copy of the newspaper announcement as a “free gift,” along with pitches for everything from insurance companies to a pharmaceutical company selling contraceptive foam. My research into the story revealed that clipping services were hired by junk mailers to get clients from such sources as newspaper birth announcements.

My story caught the attention of other publications and sent reporters and photographers to interview me at my home in California for their newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, The Honolulu Advertiser, The National Inquirer and Newsweek Magazine.

The article appeared in Newsweek on May 15, 1972, including a picture of baby Jeffrey Michael sitting inside the box where I had collected all the junk mail, causally chewing on an offer from a studio for a modeling contract. Newsweek at that time had a news service that sold stories to newspapers around the world.

The article in the Florida newspaper was published in July of 1972 and included the photo of Jeffrey Michael sampling his mail.

We didn't enroll Jeffrey with that modeling agency and he grew up in Roseburg, graduated from Roseburg High School, got a scholarship to University of California, Berkeley and is now Dr. Jeffrey Michael Duncan, a Ph.D. at a San Francisco university. At age 39, he is an international lecturer on critical pedagogy in urban schools. When his mother and I enrolled him at Berkeley, his school counselor warned us not to expect too much from Jeffrey, explaining that “even though he had a 4.0 grade point average at the rural Roseburg High School, we couldn't expect that same level of achievement from him at Berkeley.”

When Jeffrey graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree and a 3.8 grade point average, I sent that counselor a wire, reminding him Jeff was from a rural Oregon high school.

He has come a long way from that junk mail baby to the status he has today in the world of education. I must remember to send a copy of this column to that counselor.

Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.