This Prayer has been sent to you and has been around the world four times. The one who breaks it will have bad luck. The Prayer. Trust in the Lord with all thy heart and lean not on thy own understandance in all thy ways acknowledge him and he will direct thy path. Please copy this and see what happens in four days after receiving it. Send this copy and four to someone you wish good luck. It must leave in 24 hours. Don't send any money and don't keep this copy. Gen Patton received $1,600 after receiving it. Gen Allen received $1,600 and lost it because he broke the chain. You are to have good luck in 4 days. This is not a joke and you will receive by mail. [1952] This is the debut, in our sample, of Proverbs 3:5-6 ("The prayer"). This was copied on hundreds of millions of subsequent chain letters, though it is absent on some other Luck by Mail examples [1953, 1954]. Note the famous General Patton appears here, and also, well known at the time, Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen. The implication that a highly esteemed General sent the letter out could certainly boost replication. The descendants of these testimonials still appear over fifty years later, the names and amounts having undergone countless variations due to copying errors. Such changes are often the first discrepancy noticed by observant readers, and thus may serve to discredit chain letters with the public. The Luck by Mail type also introduces "this is not a joke" and the qualification that you will receive your luck "by mail." These are now mainline universals, and we judge the latter to have been the innovation most responsible for the predominance of this type in the 1950's. This hypothesis involves a possible relationship with money chain letters (> Luck Follows Money). A less obvious innovation in Luck By Mail is the unconditional declaration that by receiving the chain letter "you are to have good luck." In contrast, the Luck of London letter promised luck "four days after mailing it." This illustrates two contradictory beliefs about chain letters: in the first the letter is a talisman which by mere possession brings good luck; in the second only the act of distributing copies brings good luck. We give more examples of this dichotomy later (> Copy First, Copy Later), and discuss how textual ambiguity may benefit replication. Luck by Mail continued to circulate well into the 1960's, in many variations. This is surprising since a potent innovation appeared in 1959. 5. Death20. A chain letter mailed from Bloomsbury, New Jersey in 1959 has large blocks of text in common with the Halpert "Luck by Mail" letter given above, including the corrupted Proverb, four day deadline and nine day wait. But near the end a new testimonial has been added:
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