Monday, November 7, 2011

The Pines

My parents owned a woodworking business which they had named Whispering Pines. The name was fitting because of all the pine trees that surrounded our house.

The business kept us very busy but we always took time right after lunch to enjoy looking at all the mail we had received. After there was an article printed in the WOOD magazine about us, we got a lot of letters from people who had enjoyed it and wanted to learn more about us and the furniture we made. The local post office made sure we got the mail even though our address had been printed wrong in the magazine.

Then there was always a stack of catalogs that were fun to leaf through and most days brought a letter or two from some of our friends.

There was always the junk mail pile as well that we looked at a little bit and threw away but, there was one item in that category I have never forgotten.

An official looking envelope addressed to Whispering Pines. When Daddy had read it he started chuckling and then passed it around so the rest of us could read it as well.  It was from a company that printed genealogy books and they were happy to inform us that the latest Pines family book had been released and you, Mr. Whispering Pines are in it they claimed.

We talked about how ridiculous their claim was and how it would be fun to see who they thought the parents and siblings of our business were but, rather than wasting money on what we knew would be false information we pitched it into the trash. That little instance alone has made me leery of any offers we ever receive in the mail

5 comments:

  1. Good thing, it sure sounded like a scam.

    That is such a cutesy name "Whispering Pines"

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  2. I'm not surprised your Dad was chuckling at that one; just goes to show that those things aren't genuine.

    What a nice name for your buisness! :)

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  3. I used to be a church secretary, and we once received an invitation to buy a book about the "Church" family, and YOU, Mr. Christ Church, are listed in the book!

    It was a running joke between the rector and me for ages.

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  4. Oh, yes, those thoughtless junk mailings. A cousin, interested in family history, fell for that and actually ordered the book. Ours is an odd surname, and most people in the US who have it are related in some way. The book consisted of all the listings for that surname taken from a large number of telephone books. I think that scam still exists. In our case, people were listed -- I wonder if they would have sent you all of the "Pines" or just the "Whispering Pines," which would have been a much smaller book. What fun to speculate!

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  5. The Pitcher family was offered this as well, but we knew better ... However, one day, an email came talking about the "origin" of the Pitcher name... I clicked on the link, and then clicked on another link and after a few more clicks, found myself on a new hobby of genealogy and managed to find cousins and take our family tree back to the 1500's. HOWEVER, the original email was bunk just like the "Pitcher Book" :-)

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