In 1935, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines' director Albert Plesman personally wished Albury mayor Alderman Alfred Waugh a merry Christmas by sending him a card that has survived the 84 years since it was posted.
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The card was sent to Waugh just over a year after the successful emergency landing of the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Douglas DC-2 on Albury Racecourse at 1.17am on October 24, 1934.
Later that morning the Uiver completed its flight to Melbourne in the MacRobertson air race. Soon afterwards the Dutch Prime Minister, Dr Hendrik Colijn, spoke with Waugh by radio telephone connection from Den Haag to Melbourne.
Plesman was present with Colijn, and it is highly likely that Plesman had his own conversation with the Albury mayor.
A few months later, Plesman and Waugh met each other face to face. This was in August 1935, during Waugh's goodwill mission to Holland with his wife, Ellen.
Waugh and Plesman met on August 5, 1935 at a lunch hosted by KLM at the Palace Hotel in Scheveningen.
They met a second time on August 15, 1935 at a lunch tended to Waugh at the Excelsior Hotel in Amsterdam by the Albury Committee of Amsterdam.
That organisation had raised some £500 by public subscription, part of which was used to secure a solid silver model Uiver, which was presented to Waugh.
Waugh later said that at the luncheon, a most endearing and flattering address was given by Plesman in which he sent his "lasting gratitude to Albury and incidentally to Australia."
The card from Plesman to Waugh not only contains Christmas and New Year greetings, but it also has a scene inside the cockpit of a Douglas DC-2.
In the cockpit is a sperry compass, an instrument first fitted into DC-2s in 1935, after the Uiver had flown to Australia.
It is almost exactly 100 years since Plesman's 1919 appointment as administrator of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
This was the appointment of a man who was at the helm of KLM until his death on December 31, 1953.