Not the electronic kind. The kind that was sent about 62 years ago when stamps were 3 cents and his address at the University of Washington was simply, "Seattle 5, Washington."

Howard Coble, 83, of Olympia, Wash., said last week that he didn't know anything about the mail.

"Where it's been all that time, I don't know," Coble said.

He can thank Donna Nicholson for finding it, however.

Nicholson, who lives in the 7700 block of Mazama Street Southwest in Olympia, found several letters scattered in the street in front of her house.

"They seem like a treasure, and I would like to get them back to the proper person," Nicholson said in an e-mail to The Olympian. "Unfortunately the letters got run over by cars a couple of times, but they are still in great shape." Thinking the letters said "Howard Cable," she searched the Internet but couldn't find anyone locally or in Seattle with that name.

She contacted The Olympian for help. A former employee suggested looking for Howard Coble, whom she knew as an ex-board of trustee at St. Martin's University in Lacey, Wash.

Nicholson contacted Coble, who retrieved his lost mail.

"I remember the circumstances, but not the letters," Coble said about the lost mail.

Coble said the letters are the type of information his mother might have kept. She has died, and he still has the keepsakes she had saved.

"This isn't the type of thing I would have thrown away," he said. "I don't know why we didn't have them."

Some of the letters were sent to him by his wife of almost 60 years, when she lived in Port Orchard. There also is a 21st birthday card his mother sent to him when he was in the Army in 1946. It includes a picture of Coble when he was a child.

"It blows me away," Coble said of finding the lost mail. "It's a real mystery."