excerpt from "the balkan review", circa 2010
When a cavalry force led by an Austro-Hungarian official arrived, William Henry Park III (1876-1920) thought that the time for retribution had finally come.
Park was then just a strange man in an unknown, remote, forgotten, impervious, soon-to-be-destroyed-by-war, strangely-beautiful, uniquely-academic, ravaged-by-constant-and-deadly-waves-of-mild-flu, cradle-of-a-local-festival-that-much-later-became-known-as-Lollapalooza, town in southern Dalmatia.
And he was being looked for. That was what Park said after he arrived. And pretty much all that he said during the seven years he stayed in the town. He repeated it so much that some people started to think he wanted to be found. Lack of interest prevailed, though, and the locals just tried to ignore him.
So when the 50 knights in shining armor knocked on Park’s door, a small crowd spawned to see. The officer handed a letter, said a couple of words in an unintelligible language (English), and departed along his other 49 substitutes (they all looked the same to the locals. For a long time many commended/pitied the mother who had to give birth 50 times).
It turned out it was not the army, but the newest tier of the Austro-Hungarian Postal Service delivery service (“The Military Priority Tier”. During those years the Austro-Hungarian Army was looking for money wherever it could find it. Some brilliant officer suggested charging astronomical amounts of money to deliver letters with the guarantee of an entire company of soldiers backing it up. The first delivery would be free, though, as a way to attract new subscribers. It was an instant success, as 13,000 people tried it out for the first time. But, after a year, only five people actually paid to do it again. The program was scrapped, deleted from the records, and the officer was fired shortly after. A generous punishment, as this allowed him to avoid certain death during World War I. He lived happily ever after until his death in 1935).
A library in New England was looking for him to settle a debt of 2 dollars and seventeen cents. The letter politely asked him to show up in Springfield, Massachusetts, within the next fifteen business days. Otherwise the letters would keep coming (this was a ruse, as the New England library could not afford the astronomical fee to send another letter to Mr. Park).
The disappointment was so great that the incident was recorded in “The Annals of the Southern Dalmatians”, a deliciously local book recording the most fantastical stories of the region. Nothing more was written about Park’s fate, though, for obvious reasons.
