October 18, 2017 • 44 mins
When Ben Franklin took over the US Postal Service, he couldn’t have predicted the crazy ways the institution would evolve. From pneumatic tubes to missiles filled with mail, Will and Mango dig into the post office's weirdest experiments, while discussing why Olympic athletes can no longer mail themselves home when they lose a wallet. Featuring Nancy Pope of the National Postal Museum.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what, mango? What's that? Will? All right? So I
was reading this story from a couple of years ago,
and it was about this three year old boy whose
dog Mo had passed away. So to help the boy
cope with most passing, the boy's mom would get him
to write these letters to MO, and then they addressed
them to Mo Westbrook, Doggie Heaven Cloud one. And each
time they put the letter in the mailbox, she'd sneak
back out and remove the letter. And one day she
(00:22):
forgets to do this, and she just assumed the postal
worker would get it and throw it away. But a
few weeks later they go out to the mailbox and
there was a letter with the return address on it
from MO. And the letter read, I'm in Doggie Heaven,
I play all day, I'm happy, thank you for being
my friend. I love you, Luke. That's pretty screat Yeah.
(00:43):
And and here's the thing. So anywhere I've lived, the
mail carrier has been one of the nicest people in
the neighborhood. I mean, we chat with ours any time
we see him. And they're not only so many more
good stories about heartwarming moments like this, but they're just
so many fascinating stories in the history of the US
Postal Service. So that's what we're diving into today. Yea,
(01:21):
hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend Mangesh Ticketer and on the other side of the
soundproof glass the man who always delivers, Tristan McNeil. And
on today's show, we're shining the spotlight on one of
the great unsung heroes of our society, and that's the
US Postal Service. Of course, everybody is aware of the USPS,
(01:42):
but many of us tend to take its services for granted,
and you know, not really think about the ridiculous amount
of planning and work that goes into processing and delivering
more than half a billion pieces of mail a day.
In fact, the only time we devote much thought to
the postal Service at all this when we need something
from it, when something's gone wrong, and we want to
blow off steam by griping about it. So today we're
(02:04):
trying to break that bad habit by sharing some of
the most interesting pieces of postal history, as well as
some of the craziest stories to ever make it out
of the mailbag, definitely, and to make sure we don't
miss any of the good stuff, we'll be talking to
the keeper of postal history or itself, Nancy Pope. Nancy
Post the top historian at the National Postal Museum. So
we'll talk to her about what it takes to be
a postal historian and find out what she considers to
(02:26):
be the most interesting pieces of postal office history. All right,
So I want to start with one of the things
that really stood out to me while doing our research,
and that's the immense scope of the Postal Services operations.
I mean, we're talking about the largest retail network in
the nation. So there were thirty one thousand active US
post offices and just to put that in perspective, that's
(02:47):
that's more than all the domestic McDonald's, Starbucks and Walmart's combined.
And to staff all those locations and handle the deliveries
between them, the Postal Service employees over half a million
people and maintains a lead of two hundred and twenty
seven thousand vehicles. That's one of the largest civilian fleets
in the world. The US Postal Service is a gargantuan
(03:09):
NonStop delivery machine. Yeah, and the scope of what all
that manpower and tech can achieve is equally impressive. So
the USPS is actually responsible for the delivery of nearly
half the mail volume in the entire world. That's but
I think the most amazing thing about the whole crazy
operation is that for almost fifty years now, it's cost
(03:29):
taxpayers virtually nothing. There on a whole lot of government
departments or agencies you can say that about it is impressive.
But I notice you said costs virtually nothing for taxpayers.
And I always wondered whether like things like the postage
sales and products and all their special services like express mail,
you know, covered those costs. So are you saying it
actually does receive some government funding though? Well, you're definitely
(03:53):
right that stamp sales and stuff like that pays for
the agency's operating costs, but they do receive less than
one percent of their budget from the govern mint. According
to PolitiFact, Congress gives the Postal Service a hundred million
dollars a year to compensate the agency for providing freemailing
privileges to blind people and overseas voters. Okay, well, that
that's pretty interesting, and it's actually a pretty good return
(04:14):
on on what I would say overall as a small
investment from each taxpayer. And and honestly that that's always
been the case with mail delivery in America, even before
the US became a country, before became country. So how
is that? Well, during the Second Continental Congress in seventeen
seventy five, this is a year before the colonies would
declare their independence from England, the delegates established this postal
(04:35):
system and and appointed Ben Franklin as the first Postmaster General.
And the great thing about that is that Franklin's appointment
was this act of rebellion in itself. Like he previously
served as the postmaster General and the colonies for the
British Royal Mail system, but he'd been dismissed because of
his involvement in the Revolution. So he was actually appointed
as the first postmaster General twice. It's a good thing
(04:57):
we rehired and from our side, because you know, Franklin
really helped establish the whole basis of the postal system
as we know it today. He surveyed thousands of miles
of post roads and made adjustments so that routes would
be more efficient. He also instituted the idea of having
postal riders traveled day and night. They'd use landers to
light the way for their horses, and all these changes
(05:18):
greatly improved the speed of the mail by some estimates,
cutting delivery times in half. That's crazy. So I had
no idea that the postal riders were around the clock.
And I guess that mentality is the same one that
gives it, like the post office create about not a
snow nor rain. Yeah, there's the whole thing that people
always talk about that, you know that neither snow nor
rain or heat or gloom YadA, YadA, YadA. But actually
(05:40):
it's pretty interesting. There's no such thing as a postman's creed.
I was looking at this and and and so people
always associate that phrase with the postal Service because it's
engraved on the outside of a famous post office in
New York, But there's really no official motto for the USPS.
In fact, the phrase isn't even original to our own
postal system. It's actually a translation of the Greek historian
(06:02):
Herodotus and his description of the ancient Persian male courier.
So apparently they did all of this through neither heat
nor rain or whatever it was, and all that gloom.
But yeah, I mean, I guess that's a bit of
a letdown, but it does feel strange that we expect
our electric bills to be delivered during blizzards. I think
they've actually done a pretty decent job of meeting these,
(06:24):
you know, admittedly high expectations. Because there's one other thing
that amazed me while doing the research, and that's just
how versatile an organization the USPS is. So it's grown
right along with the country for hundreds of years, and
it's had to evolve the fifth expanding needs of the public. Yeah,
so well, one of the first major transitions took place
back in eightee, when the USPS first started delivering mail
(06:46):
by train, and so prior to that most deliveries have
been made on horseback or by horse drawn wagon. And
when the mail volume increased, that's when things changed. But
the burgeoning railroad, with its hubs in major cities, that
all allowed the mail to be delivered up and down
the East coast, and the tech changes only increased from there.
So like cars and trucks arrived on the mail scene
(07:07):
in and airplanes soon followed suit in nineteen eleven, I believe, yeah,
and you know, you can still see that kind of
versatility today. According to the Postal Service, they use every
transportation method available to them while making their rounds. I
was looking at a list of the different ways they
deliver mail that include planes, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, subways,
(07:30):
float planes, hovercraft, mules, bicycles, and of course feat I
feel like I should be stunned by hovercrafts, but it's
really mules that's confusing to me. Yeah, it's still on
the list. There's actually one mail by mule route left
in the US, and it's this eight mile trail that
leads down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon where
the Havasupai tribe. They've lived there for over eight hundred years,
(07:53):
and so six days a week the mule train carries
about four thousand pounds of male food supplies and even
for Richard down these steep walls of the canyon. I
was trying to look to see how long this took.
It takes about three hours for the team to get
down there, but it's a five hour trip coming back
up and it happened six days a week. That's so crazy,
and it's amazing that the mail really does go everywhere.
(08:15):
But but you know, there's one delivery method that I'm
kind of bummed is missing from the current list. Pneumatic tubes. Right, So,
before mail trucks took to the streets, the six major
cities I've got these written downs as at Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Brooklyn,
New York, and Chicago, they all made use of underground
networks of pressurized air tubes to deliver their mail. And
(08:38):
at the system's peak in nineteen the city's had a
combined total of over fifty six miles of pneumatic tubes,
all zigzagging beneath the surface. And while these tube systems
start popping up in the U S during the eighteen nineties,
it's actually been used in Europe for almost forty years
by that point. Apparently there were first put to use
in stock exchanges so that traders could communicate messages to
(09:00):
buy or sell stocks, and you know, a faster rate
than telegraph, and it makes sense as a way to
get messages across and the noumatic tubes or what the
banks use, and those are really fast. But you know,
we're talking about a hundred and twenty plus years ago,
so were they actually fast in the eight nineties. Yeah.
The weird thing is they were pretty fast, Like the
male tubes in the U s could move a canister
(09:21):
holding up to six hundred letters an average speed of
thirty five miles per hour. Yeah. So as one example,
uh and their stories of postal workers who worked the
tubes that they were known as rocketeers. But these rocketeers
in downtown New York City actually ordered sandwiches from this
deli up in the Bronx and apparently they'd received their
orders via pneumatic tube within twenty minutes. I want to
(09:42):
order a sandwich by Nematic. That is pretty awesome, although
I'm guessing ordering lunch wasn't officially sanctioned for the use
of the tubes. But so, did you come across any
other weird stuff that was sent by these tubes? Definitely so.
According to an article and written by Robert Cohen for
the USPS website, there was this bizar our opening ceremony
where the first tubes were installed at the General post
(10:03):
Office in New York City and the higher ups they're
basically wanted to show the employees what their new toy
could do. So the very first male canister to travel
the tubes. It contained a Bible, a flag, and a
copy of the Constitution, which is super patriotic. And the
second contained this imitation peach in honor of a Senator
Chauncey Deput. Apparently he was fondly known as the Peach.
(10:26):
Even more patriotic. And the third carrier is the weirdest.
It had a black cat inet a black Oh wow,
that's pretty weird. And as much as I dislike cats,
I really hate the idea of somebody stuffing a cat
into a tube. Was the ket Okay? Yeah, well, well
the cat was fine. It was a little dazed according
to witnesses, but otherwise all right. And sadly though, this
(10:49):
was just the first of many animals to be shot
around New York City through a pressurized tube. So Kenneth Stewart.
He's the author of a Pneumatic Male Tubes and Operation
of Automatic Railroads. He says that plenty of other animals
made the journey to including dogs and mice and roosters,
guinea pigs, monkeys, even some goldfish. Yeah, and in one
(11:09):
of those cases it actually involved sending a sick cat
to the animal hospital, so it was a good use.
But the rest were mostly just examples of postal workers
showing off. I said, it's not this Postal Services proudest moment,
but but I actually don't get it. So animal cruelty aside.
I mean, it sounds like the tubes worked pretty well
in these sprawling city so so why don't we see
(11:29):
New Yorkers and others still using them? Yes, there's actually
a few reasons. One was that the mail volumes kept
increasing and it was simply too much for the tubes
to handle, especially considering the systems pipes were only between
two and eight inches wide. Oh my god, that poor cat.
I can't about that. Yeah, But the main reason is
that most of the tube systems were built and owned
by private companies and and they merely rented to the
(11:52):
Post Office. So, uh, these rental costs just got too
high in the long term. And according to Kate Astor,
who's the author of the work Anatomy of a City, uh,
let me just find this quote. She wrote, by eighteen
the federal government considered the annual rental payments seventeen thousand
dollars per mile per annum made by the Post Office
(12:13):
to be exorbitant, and they endorsed a new alternative with
greater capacity, the automobile as the delivery method of choice. Yeah,
I mean, as sad as it is to see does
go away, I guess it, it makes sense and I
can't deny that thematic tubes and mule trains they do
add this pop of color to the Postal Services history though, Yeah,
totally and in fact, well, why don't we get a
(12:33):
historian online and see what other weird stories are lurking
in the USPS archives? Sounds like a plan. So our
guest today has been with the Smithsonian Institution for over
three decades now, which Mango. I'm pretty sure that makes
her super smart if I'm not mistaken so, but more
(12:53):
importantly for today's episode, she's been curating exhibits at the
National Postal Museum since it opened in nineteen. She's now
the head curator of the history department there. Nancy Pope,
welcome to Part time Genius. Thank you, it's good to
be here. So, Nancy, we've had so much fun digging
into the history of the Postal Service, and we've talked
about all the things like, you know, delivery by mule
(13:14):
and pneumatic tubes and all kinds of stuff. But but
do you have a favorite delivery method that's actually no
longer being used. I have a favorite method that was
used once. What's that? It's missile mail. On June, the
US Navy fired a Regulus one missile off the USS Barbaro,
(13:38):
which was floating out in the Atlantic, and they directed
it to land at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Mayport, Florida.
And instead of having a nuclear weapon on board, they
had two blue and red metal containers that held three
thousand letters. Wow, So so why were they are doing this?
(14:00):
Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was a man who really wanted
to modernize his post office, and he was doing anything
and everything he could do to kind of try that,
and he was trying a lot of silly things. He
thought about missile mail, and he talked to the War Department,
and they had their own little idea that they wanted
(14:22):
to make sure the Russians knew that we were so
good with our missiles that we could direct them to
land anywhere we wanted, and they were so useful that
we could use them too. I don't know carry mail.
The letter that Summerfield since and was one of the
three thousand letters they were actually all the same letters
inside the missile. He says that this is just the beginning,
(14:47):
but um, he's smarter than that, and I think it
was a pr stunt from beginning to end for both
the war and the post Office department. Actually, one of
the other examples I saw was the railway mail crane,
which doesn't seem that exciting at first, but can you
explain how that worked in terms of the trains passing
through towns pretty quickly. In the days of railway mail.
(15:11):
Most of the times the trains would actually stop and
exchange to the mail at a train station, but they
couldn't stop at every single one, you know, most trains
were not milk runs, and so to exchange the mail
at some of these towns, they had to figure out
a way to get the mail bag off and a
mail bag onto the train while the train was moving,
(15:33):
And they came up with these cranes, and the postmaster
would go up and hook a mail bag, a leather
mail bag to this crane, so it was passing at
top and bottom stretched out so it was very tight.
And then the train would come along and the clerk
on the train would be looking out his door and
(15:54):
he had a long iron crane that was attached to
the door, and he'd swing that out. And you could
never swing it out too early because then you knocked
the telephone poles down. But you had to watch out
and be very very careful until you saw the cranes
and you slung your iron crane up and the crane
would actually grab the mail bag and you would pull
(16:16):
the crane back in, and while you're doing this, you
would kick the mail bag full of mails for that
station off the train. So you do it all of
this at once, and you had to kick really hard
because if you didn't, it got sucked under the train
and mail bag would explode letters everywhere. And they called
(16:37):
that a snowfall. Wow, that's pretty actually sounds like could
be pretty dangerous at the same time. But that that's
that's very interesting. So I know the main vehicle used
by the postal service, this Grunman l LV or the
Long Life Vehicle. I read somewhere recently that it gets
an average fuel economy of about ten miles a gallon.
(16:57):
If and if that's the case, what are your thoughts on,
you know, why that vehicle was chosen and why we
haven't seen a move away from that vehicle given how
much fuel must be used in a given week. The
l l V was selected after a test run. What
happened was the Post Office Department UM was tired of
(17:17):
just buying their vehicles off the rocks. They said, we
have very special needs. We're going to list our needs
and then we're going to stay build a vehicle to
those needs. They were put over, you know, horrible ditches.
They were put over cobblestones. They had to stop and start,
stop and start stops, all the things that are a
(17:38):
male vehicle has to do that our regular cars don't.
And the LLLV, the grummin l l V, won the test.
And because they won that test, that's why they were selected.
And they were also selected because they could last twenty
five years. A bigger problem right now is twenty five
years has expired or most of that fleet, and the
(18:02):
Post Office Department very much wants to get new cars,
and they have started bringing in new vehicles um bit
by bit, but it's gonna be you know, millions of
dollars to replace the total LLV fleets it's left. So
let's talk stamps for a second. Are there any historical
(18:23):
figures you feel are overdue for a recognition on the stamp.
I would think Arthur Summerhills should be on a stamp
if he hasn't been yet. And that was the postmaster
general who did the missile mail, just because he came
up with the whole concept of modernizing the post office
department in the fifties, because it had been stuck in
(18:43):
the thirties with no money because of the depression in
the forties, with no money because of World War Two.
So by the fifties they were using thirty year old
trucks that were barely being held together by you know,
spit and glue. Uh, they're mechan there's systems of moving
the mail inside a post office were just antiquated. Everything
(19:08):
was old and i'm stupid and rotten and nothing was
working well. And he came in and basically convinced Congress
to give him a lot of money to modernize things,
and he kick started a whole lot of stuff in
the post office department. Got automation going, computerized sorting systems,
the zip code system, all of that would have never
(19:30):
exists if it wasn't for Summerfield. So, yeah, get him
lot of stamp. Yeah, Well, we'll start the petition. Yeah, yeah, Well,
for all of our listeners that are visiting the Smithsonian
Museums anytime in the near future, we hope you'll check
out the National Postal Museum. It is a fascinating place
to visit. But Nancy, thanks so much for joining us
on part Time Genius. That was my pleasure. You're listening
(20:05):
to part Time Genius, and we're talking about the fascinating
evolution of the US Postal Service. So well, we've mentioned
a few times now that an increase in mail volume
was the main reason for a bunch of the mail
system's major changes, Like it's the reason we switched from
horses to carriages and then from tubes to trucks. And
it's also why the number of post offices bloon from
you know, just seventy five way back in sev over
(20:28):
twenty eight thousand in eighteen sixty. And in fact, this
ever increasing mail volume became the accepted status quo for
over two hundred years, no matter what changes came in
the form of new transportation styles or competing communication systems
like telegraphs or telephones or radios or TVs. Like the
one truth for the postal service was that mail volume
(20:49):
just continued to go up and up. But all of
that changed in two thousand seven, when for the first
time in history, mail started to decline. Yeah, and and
that was the year that the effects of the Internet
really started to catch up to them. And and ever
since then, the net mail volume flowing through the system
is decreased every single year. And it's a big problem
for the agency, especially being a self funded agency, because
(21:12):
any decrease in mail is a decrease in revenue exactly.
And at the same time, the public still expects to
receive mail every day of the week at any address
in the country. This has led to the postal Service
having to increase its number of delivery points, which opposites
operating costs even as profits steadily shrink. It's it's you know,
it's not all gloom and doom, though I was. I
(21:32):
was reading this article on upworthy that proposed an interesting solution.
You know. They were looking at their their financial woes
and trying to come up with things to do, and
there's the idea for post offices to start offering financial services,
things like check cashing and payday loans. It's roughly thirty
five million American households rely on alternative financial services like
that instead of traditional banking, and since they currently have
(21:55):
to go through private institutions, you know, for these different
kinds of services, it can wind up cost way more
money than it should. In fact, according to a report
released by the USPS, Americans spend the total of about
eighty nine billion dollars on interest and fees from these
alternative financial services. This was from back in two thousand twelve,
which is crazy, right, it really is. But but see,
(22:16):
if post offices were allowed to compete in that market,
they could undercut the competition, save millions for Americans and
secure this nice new revenue stream in the process. At
least that's the hope, and and it seems like a
win win and and not that far fetched the concept.
I mean, post offices already offer some banking services like
selling money orders and cashing treasury checks. Yeah, you know,
(22:37):
really the main thing preventing this from happening, it would
be the banks themselves. They have an awful lot of
clout and government and of course they don't like the
idea of a public institution muscling into their territory. But
who knows. I mean, if the situation continues to worsen
for the USPS, those voices of opposition might cease to
carry as much sway. Yeah, and the good news is
that history is on the postal services side, so it's
(22:59):
faced some any dire challenges in the past, and it's
always smuddled through. I mean, if you need any evidence
of the resilience of the USPS, you just have to
look at zip codes. That's a good point. And there's
definitely an aspect of mail we take for granted. So
so actually I think we should spend a little time
talking about zip codes, sure, so we can give a
little background on it. For starters. Zip codes are a
(23:20):
much more recent innovation than you'd guess. Although they were
first developed as this time saving tool to help understaff
post offices, and this was during World War Two, they
weren't actually putting to use until twenty years later in ninete.
And this was a time before the Postal Service was
self funding. It's still received the bulk of its funds
from Congress, but in the mid sixties Congress wasn't supplying
(23:42):
enough cash to keep up with the post war mail boom. Yeah,
and post offices wanted new sorting machines so they could
finally automate the process instead of continuing to wage this
really unwinnable war that was hand sorting at the time.
But Congress thought they were making a big deal out
of nothing. I mean, after all, they had handled mail
the old fashioned way for over a century at this point,
so as they saw, you know, why fix what isn't broken,
(24:04):
except it was broken. I mean. The proof finally came
in October of nineteen sixty six, and that's the month
when a combination of election mailings and holiday season advertisements
they totally clogged the system. It was like a mail
fat burg. And then the whole thing came to a
staff like the Chicago Post Office, which was the largest
in the country at the time, halted mail delivery for
(24:25):
a full three weeks while they tried to make sense
of this volume and and all these letters and parcels
that needed to be sorted. I mean, the whole thing
led Congress back to the move to automation, And at
the center of it all was this old zip code idea,
which was finally taken off the shelf and put into action.
And with the new machinery and the advent of zip codes,
postal workers were able to sort up to thirty thousand
(24:47):
letters an hour, which was nearly ten times as many
as a single worker could sort by hand in the
same amount of time, which I find almost as baffling
that a single worker was previously able to sort three thousand.
I know, us unbelievable, but obviously this was a huge,
huge improvement. But I do think we should take a
second to explain the role ZIP codes played in that process, because,
(25:09):
you know, as often as we're exposed the ZIP codes,
I feel like most of us don't really know that
much about them, or that they're actually an acronym. ZIP
stands for Zoning Improvement Plan. Yeah, and and the name
really does say at all. So the numbers were part
of the plan to improve the way that mail was
sorted by address, and a ZIP code specified which region
or zone of the country to which a piece of
(25:29):
mail should be sent. And instead of hand sorting letters
by city address, which obviously took a good deal of
time in some cases and required, you know, knowledge of geography,
machines were able to electronically scan the short string of
numbers and sort the mail using that coded information. Yeah,
and that's another thing that I think most of us
don't really understand is what exactly those five numbers means.
(25:50):
So I'll just explain that. So, the first digit represents
the region where the address is located. So for the
purposes of zip codes, the country split into ten zones.
You start on the East coast, and then you increase
that number as you move across to the west coast.
So you know, Maine and New York have zip codes
that start with zero and one, Maryland's a two, and
(26:11):
then you go all the way across the country. You
get to California and Washington and they begin with the
number nine. That's pretty awesome. And and I'm guessing the
other four digits specify the location of an address even
further Yep, they get even more specific, so that the
second two digits correspond to a smaller area of the
country and and the central postal facility that services that region,
and then the final two digits signify the actual local
(26:33):
post office that delivers to that given address. But to me,
the best part of it was that the USPS had
this advertising campaign they launched in the sixties to raise
awareness of the new system. Oh that's so, there was
this little jingle used to promote it or something like that. Yeah,
and that's underselling it a bit. So it was actually
this fifteen minute musical p s A performed by none
(26:54):
other than the Swinging Six Swinging I love that. It
was fifteen minutes. My god, I know. And and there's
no way to do this thing justice by talking about it.
You really need to YouTube it. But the short of
it is that the Postal Service financed this incredibly campy
video as a means of like selling the public on
the importance of ZIP codes and how it was going
(27:14):
to make everything speedier and more efficient. And they also
created this new cartoon mascot named Mr Zip and that
really helped drive home the point as well. I remember
Mr Zip, that creepy little male man stick figured And
they kind of went all out with this campaign. I mean,
they really had no faith in the American public to
write these five extra digits to they apparently not. But
(27:35):
Mr Zip in the Swinging Six like, they really caught
on and and Mr Zip became something of a pop
culture icon in his own right. He appeared on magazines
and mail trucks and television and radio ads and even
on things like lunch boxes. But but of course, the
surest sign of mr Zip's success was that by seventy
which was really just seven years after the start of
(27:57):
the campaign, zip code use had risen to let me
find these numbers eighty six percent nationwide, and by seventy
nine it had climbed to nine. I mean, those are
pretty solid results, and it does make you feel for
mr Zip a little bit. I mean, he seems that
played a pretty big role in all of this. Kind
of the uh I don't know, like the smokey bear
(28:17):
of the postal service, but you don't find him anywhere
these days. I know he's hanging out with Clippy for Microsoft,
but I feel like you're preaching to acquire here. You
know what's weird, though, is that the USPS actually did
try out one other mascot before mr Zip and it's
kind of a weird story. But before we get into it,
let's break for a quiz. Okay man goes So, when
(28:44):
we put out a call for listeners to let us
know if they wanted to come on and play a quiz,
one of them wrote in and it's actually a mail carrier,
which is perfect for today's episode. I know, it's so awesome, alright, so,
Sarah Hofferbert, welcome to Part Time Genius. Hi, thank you
so much, Sarah. Where are you you delivering mail today?
I'm in Rochester, New York today? Okay, all right, I
(29:04):
assume that's where you deliver mail every day around the city,
different places yet, okay? And how long have you been
a and and his mail carrier? The correct term? What
is the official title? My my My job title is
that I'm a letter carrier, but mail carriers just just fine? Okay?
And how long have you been doing this? About four years? Okay?
All right, Well, thank you for writing in. We're We're
(29:26):
glad you're a regular listener of Part Time Genius, and
so we are going to put you to the test. Mango.
What is our quiz called today? It's called going Postal
and it's a true false quiz. If you know everything
about the post office is history, it should be pretty easy, alright.
You know every single thing about the history of the
post office. There's nothing I don't know. All right, confidence,
(29:48):
here we go. We're gonna read you a statement and
all you need to do is tell us whether it's
true or false. You ready to go? Yes? Okay? Question
number one, the first post office in Colonial America was
in a bar. That is true. Exactly, you're right. So
it was set up in sixteen thirty nine and operated
out of the Boston home in tavern of Richard Fairbanks,
(30:11):
where he liked to serve glasses of strong water. Excellent,
All right, she has one for one, okay, Sarah. Question
number two. In Luxembourg, the post office trained Saint Bernard's
to carry letters to homes, but the system only lasted
a month thanks to the city's squirrel population. That sounds
like something I would want to be true, But yeah,
(30:32):
you're right. I mean, it's not a totally crazy idea,
because Belgium did try delivering mail by cats for a
little bit that that was a total disaster. Okay, okay,
so far, Sarah, you're delivering this is great. Question number three.
In Victorian London, mail was delivered twelve times a day.
That is also true. She's amazing at this. Yeah, mail
(30:55):
was treated more like instant messenger back then, when people
actually like sent immediate sponsors back and they get upset
if you didn't respond. Okay, alright, two left, She's three
for three so far. Question number four. When Harry Winston
donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian in nineteen It
was actually sent via US mail. True or faults. I
(31:16):
want to say that's true. It is true. So they
sent it by first class mail for just two dollars
and forty four cents and the Smithsonian still has the packaging. Wow,
and how much was that worth? Three million dollars? Any
a little bit of insurance on that? That is incredible.
All right, we are four for four. Coming up with
the last question. Let's see if Sarah can score perfect.
Let's see all right, question number five. Ben Franklin was
(31:39):
so obsessed with yams as a tasty snack that in
the winter he insisted that every mail carrier received a warm,
grilled yam before servicing their route through or faults. That
would be delicious in the winter. But I want to
say that's false. That's amazing. You an incredible five for five. Yeah.
I wanted that one to be true so much. But mango.
(32:02):
But alright, so Sarah went an incredible five for five.
What does she want today? So? Uh, Sarah actually gets
an official part time genius Certificate of Genius, which we're
we're just making and she's gonna be the first recipient
all right, we will send that to you. Yeah, we
will send that to you and the male safe travels
on your route today. And thanks again for joining us,
Thank you for having me. Alright, Mango, So you were
(32:37):
talking about this other postal mascot before the break, So,
so what's weird about it? Well, for for starters, the
mascot was a dog, which is a surprising choice for
postal workers given the history between the two. All Right, well,
I know you're usually the tangent person, but I feel
like I want to go on one here as well,
because I was actually kind of curious about the deal
with dogs and postal workers, so I was looking into
(32:59):
it a little bit, and and actually this psychology of
having their turf invaded and understanding why they always go
after the postal workers. So the situations made way worse
by the fact that the mail carriers keep coming day
in and day out, and and that's something I had
not really thought about before. So it reinforces the idea
that the dog needs to defend its territory. And you know,
(33:20):
because the carriers do eventually walk away from the home,
the dog feels rewarded and it's likely to repeat that
same behavior next time. It's basically the definition of a
vicious cycle, and a major emphasis on the vicious part
here because actually I was looking at the numbers. According
to the USPS, more than six thousand of its mail
carriers are attacked by dogs each man. That's terrible, and
(33:43):
I'm actually glad I get to talk about this mascot now.
It's it's a nice throwback to these days when dogs
and postal workers were actually friends. But uh, at least
that was the case with this particular dog named Ony
that was the actual dog. Is that this is a
real dog? Owny? Yeah, so only was a stray mutt
who started joining a mail clerk on his morning walk. Uh.
(34:04):
This was in Albany, New York, way back in and
this morning routine gradually led to any hanging out at
the office during the day, and he became friends with
other postal clerks, and he also developed this strange affinity
for the texture of mail bags, both the texture and
the smell. And once his clerk pal moved away, the
other mail clerks took him in and from there only
(34:26):
started following his beloved mail bags onto mail wagons and trains,
and he rode with the bags in the post office
train cars traveling all over the country and later all
over the world, and all these railroad workers were cool
with some random dog just traveling around with him. Yeah,
apparently they loved Onny. So train wrecks were really common
at the time, but no train ever crashed with one
(34:48):
on board. And he kind of became this good luck
charm for the railway mail clerks and this unofficial mascot
whose many travels were marked by people placing medals and
tags on his collar. That's really sweet. But so did
you get to keep one of the mail bags when
he retired? No, so that this story actually has kind
of a sad ending. So Oney never made it to retirement.
(35:08):
In June, only boarded a mail train for Toledo, Ohio.
And while only was making his rounds and you know,
greeting all these people in Toledo, one postal clerk showed
him do a newspaper reporter and the full details have
never been investigated, but supposedly only became ill tempered and
he was shot on June. God MANO, that really took
(35:28):
a turn there, I know. But like I said, we
don't really know that full details, but we do know
that the mail clerks were totally devastated. They took up
this collection and used the money to have only preserved
and today visitors to the National Postal Museum in Washington,
d C. Can actually see one on display, still wearing
his harness and some of his favorite tags. That's pretty neat. Well,
(35:49):
I guess that's about as happy of an inning as
you can get with a story like that. But honestly,
I'm glad to hear they put his remains in the
museum instead of just stuffing him in one of those
thematic twos we were talking about earlier. Yeah, I mean
only never traveled by two, but there are plenty of
animals who make trips by mail even today. You know.
I saw that, like, apparently live scorpions are totally fine
(36:09):
to mail, and you know, as long as they're to
be used for medical or anti venom research. I don't
know how you prove that, but that's those are the
reasons you can mail them, and they're clearly marked as
live scorpions. Also saw that baby alligators are mailable too,
as long as they're under twenty. This all feels totally
crazy to me, but but by the way, my my
favorite animal by mail story is the one about this
(36:31):
guy in Ohio who mailed his pet chameleon to Florida
so they could have a warmer place to live. He
was worried a little guy wouldn't make it through the
cold winter in Ohio, so he slipped the lizard into
this pre stamped envelope and mailed it off to the
Sunshine State. So did this Did the chameleon make it? Yeah?
The sender had requested that he'd be informed when his
pet arrived, and sure enough, Orlando's postmaster obliged. He responded, Uh,
(36:54):
let me find this, Dear David. I received your chameleon
yesterday and he was immediately released on the post office grounds.
Best wishes for a merry Christmas. That's an animal in
the mail story. Alright. You know, still as weird as
mailing around chameleons and alligators and scorpions as it's it's
nothing compared to mailing actual people, which I know we
(37:16):
both saw in our research has actually happened. I know
I was hoping this would come off. So there's such
a long successful history of people sending themselves and each
other through the mail, and as far as we know,
the first person to travel by mail was baby James Beagle.
He was this eight month old boy whose parents mailed
him to his grandmother a few miles away. Eight months old,
(37:36):
I know a baby Graham. And this was just a
few weeks after the Postal Service began transporting larger parcels
rather than just letters or magazines, so it really didn't
take long for someone to try mailing a human. Apparently,
the main appeal was that postage was way cheaper than
a train ticket. Baby James's travel apparently only cost his
parents fifteen cents and stints, though to be fair they
(37:57):
did spring for fifty dollars and insured nice the parents
of the year right there. But you're right though, mailing
yourself is definitely an inexpensive way to travel. I was
reading about this professional javelin thrower from Australia's name was
Red Spears, and in nineteen sixty four he went up
stranded in England after failing to make the cut for
the English Olympic team. He was all set to return
(38:18):
home and then his wallet was stolen and so he
was left flat broken without any way back to Australia.
His solution, I'll seal himself in a small crate and
actually mail himself cash on delivery. So how long was
he in there? I think it was like a three
day trip and all. And this this includes this particularly
toasty layover and Mumbai where you know, his limited provisions
(38:40):
and makeshift bathroom slash water bottle. I mean, these things
were stretched to their limits on this three day trip.
And in the end though, the plan worked and he
made it safely back to Australia. Of course, reporters quickly
caught wind of this embarrassing ordeal, but Spears even managed
to turn that to his advantage. The airline itself took
pity on him forgave his dad. He even went on
(39:01):
to co author a book about the experience. It was titled,
of course, out of the Box. That's pretty great. But
my favorite story of all time of someone shifting himself
in a box has to be Henry Box Brown, the
slave who mailed himself to freedom. Oh that's a good one. Yeah,
you should tell this story definitely. So in Eine Brown
escaped his master's property in Virginia and with the help
(39:23):
of some abolitionists, he mailed himself across state lines to
the free state of Pennsylvania. It cost him eighty six dollars,
which is a little more than today, and the trip
lasted a miserable twenty seven hours, but it actually went
off without a hitch. The next day, Brown was successfully
delivered to Freedom, and he went on to become a
well known entertainer and abolitionist speaker in his later life.
(39:46):
And that was all thanks to the U S. Mail System. Man, Well,
if that's not a ringing endorsement for the USPS, I'm
honestly not sure what is. Yeah, but what do you
say we now honor one of our own sacred institutions
with a good old fashioned fact. Yeah, I'll start with
(40:10):
the story about how a stamp was used to do
some serious trash talking and almost started a war. In
the nineteen thirties, Nicaragua's postal service put out a stamp
that featured a map of Nicaragua. The stamp also showed
Honduras north of Nicaragua's border, but instead of just letting
it be, the stamp labeled the territory quote territory in dispute.
And this was despite the fact that the territory issues
(40:32):
have been settled thirty years earlier. When the stamps first
started arriving with mail and Honduras people started rioting and
a mob showed up at the Nicaraguan embassy, and after
both countries sent troops to the border, the US and
Mexico actually had to interview in just to prevent the war.
All right, this is pretty different one. So ever, wonder
where the mail goes when it's the term that it
(40:53):
cannot be delivered and the postal service doesn't know where
to return it to. It's actually not far at all
from where we're sitting right now. This is to the
Mail Recovery Center here in Atlanta. So sadly it took
on this name in nine when its name was changed
from what had been the Dead Letter Office, which I
just love so much more. But the MRC then auctions
(41:13):
off these items of value, not not individually. They're actually
sold as these big groups of things. So there have
even been entire tractor trailers of books sold as an example.
That's kind of awesome. So I was looking at some
stats on junk mail. The amount of junk mail received
by all American households in the US each year is
the equivalent of about hundred million trees, and junk mail
(41:34):
manufacturing creates the equivalent of three point seven million cars
in greenhouse gas emissions. Alright, So, hikers in Nevada and
Utah and other areas of these vast landscapes have been
puzzled by these huge concrete arrows on the ground. But
if you were to fly over these arrows, you'd actually
see that they're part of this cross country path of arrows.
(41:55):
So in the nies, Congress approved the creation of a
nearly three thousand mile line of the seventy foot long
yellow concrete arrows, stretching from New York to San Francisco.
They're about ten miles apart, and the purpose was to
give pilots of the time away to navigate safely across
the various thirteen stops from coast to coast, which is
actually awesome. So until the nineteen sixties, most college students
(42:19):
actually mailed their dirty clothes home to mom to wash,
and this was until washing machines became more common. It
was also expected that mom would send your clean underwear
back with a fresh batch of cookies. I'm kind of
hoping my mom's not listening to this, because because I
still send my clothes home to mom, I don't want
her to know that most people don't do this anymore,
but I gotta admit it. That's a great fact. So
(42:40):
I'm gonna have to give you this fact off. Congratulations. Now,
if we missed any of your favorite postal service facts,
you can email us as always part Time Genius at
how stuff Works dot com or call seven Fact hot
Line one eight four four pt Genius. It is still
seven right, mengo. Okay, that's great. Well, thank you guys
so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time
(43:15):
Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't
be possible without several brilliant people who do the important
things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does
the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and
does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the
exact producer thing. Gabeluesier is our lead researcher, with support
from the research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and
Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the show to
(43:37):
your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard,
we hope you'll subscribe. And if you really really like
what you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review
for us. Do we do we forget Jason? Jason who
Guess what, mango? What's that? Will? All right? So I
was reading this story from a couple of years ago,
and it was about this three year old boy whose
dog Mo had passed away. So to help the boy
cope with most passing, the boy's mom would get him
to write these letters to MO, and then they addressed
them to Mo Westbrook, Doggie Heaven Cloud one. And each
time they put the letter in the mailbox, she'd sneak
back out and remove the letter. And one day she
(00:22):
forgets to do this, and she just assumed the postal
worker would get it and throw it away. But a
few weeks later they go out to the mailbox and
there was a letter with the return address on it
from MO. And the letter read, I'm in Doggie Heaven,
I play all day, I'm happy, thank you for being
my friend. I love you, Luke. That's pretty screat Yeah.
(00:43):
And and here's the thing. So anywhere I've lived, the
mail carrier has been one of the nicest people in
the neighborhood. I mean, we chat with ours any time
we see him. And they're not only so many more
good stories about heartwarming moments like this, but they're just
so many fascinating stories in the history of the US
Postal Service. So that's what we're diving into today. Yea,
(01:21):
hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend Mangesh Ticketer and on the other side of the
soundproof glass the man who always delivers, Tristan McNeil. And
on today's show, we're shining the spotlight on one of
the great unsung heroes of our society, and that's the
US Postal Service. Of course, everybody is aware of the USPS,
(01:42):
but many of us tend to take its services for granted,
and you know, not really think about the ridiculous amount
of planning and work that goes into processing and delivering
more than half a billion pieces of mail a day.
In fact, the only time we devote much thought to
the postal Service at all this when we need something
from it, when something's gone wrong, and we want to
blow off steam by griping about it. So today we're
(02:04):
trying to break that bad habit by sharing some of
the most interesting pieces of postal history, as well as
some of the craziest stories to ever make it out
of the mailbag, definitely, and to make sure we don't
miss any of the good stuff, we'll be talking to
the keeper of postal history or itself, Nancy Pope. Nancy
Post the top historian at the National Postal Museum. So
we'll talk to her about what it takes to be
a postal historian and find out what she considers to
(02:26):
be the most interesting pieces of postal office history. All right,
So I want to start with one of the things
that really stood out to me while doing our research,
and that's the immense scope of the Postal Services operations.
I mean, we're talking about the largest retail network in
the nation. So there were thirty one thousand active US
post offices and just to put that in perspective, that's
(02:47):
that's more than all the domestic McDonald's, Starbucks and Walmart's combined.
And to staff all those locations and handle the deliveries
between them, the Postal Service employees over half a million
people and maintains a lead of two hundred and twenty
seven thousand vehicles. That's one of the largest civilian fleets
in the world. The US Postal Service is a gargantuan
(03:09):
NonStop delivery machine. Yeah, and the scope of what all
that manpower and tech can achieve is equally impressive. So
the USPS is actually responsible for the delivery of nearly
half the mail volume in the entire world. That's but
I think the most amazing thing about the whole crazy
operation is that for almost fifty years now, it's cost
(03:29):
taxpayers virtually nothing. There on a whole lot of government
departments or agencies you can say that about it is impressive.
But I notice you said costs virtually nothing for taxpayers.
And I always wondered whether like things like the postage
sales and products and all their special services like express mail,
you know, covered those costs. So are you saying it
actually does receive some government funding though? Well, you're definitely
(03:53):
right that stamp sales and stuff like that pays for
the agency's operating costs, but they do receive less than
one percent of their budget from the govern mint. According
to PolitiFact, Congress gives the Postal Service a hundred million
dollars a year to compensate the agency for providing freemailing
privileges to blind people and overseas voters. Okay, well, that
that's pretty interesting, and it's actually a pretty good return
(04:14):
on on what I would say overall as a small
investment from each taxpayer. And and honestly that that's always
been the case with mail delivery in America, even before
the US became a country, before became country. So how
is that? Well, during the Second Continental Congress in seventeen
seventy five, this is a year before the colonies would
declare their independence from England, the delegates established this postal
(04:35):
system and and appointed Ben Franklin as the first Postmaster General.
And the great thing about that is that Franklin's appointment
was this act of rebellion in itself. Like he previously
served as the postmaster General and the colonies for the
British Royal Mail system, but he'd been dismissed because of
his involvement in the Revolution. So he was actually appointed
as the first postmaster General twice. It's a good thing
(04:57):
we rehired and from our side, because you know, Franklin
really helped establish the whole basis of the postal system
as we know it today. He surveyed thousands of miles
of post roads and made adjustments so that routes would
be more efficient. He also instituted the idea of having
postal riders traveled day and night. They'd use landers to
light the way for their horses, and all these changes
(05:18):
greatly improved the speed of the mail by some estimates,
cutting delivery times in half. That's crazy. So I had
no idea that the postal riders were around the clock.
And I guess that mentality is the same one that
gives it, like the post office create about not a
snow nor rain. Yeah, there's the whole thing that people
always talk about that, you know that neither snow nor
rain or heat or gloom YadA, YadA, YadA. But actually
(05:40):
it's pretty interesting. There's no such thing as a postman's creed.
I was looking at this and and and so people
always associate that phrase with the postal Service because it's
engraved on the outside of a famous post office in
New York, But there's really no official motto for the USPS.
In fact, the phrase isn't even original to our own
postal system. It's actually a translation of the Greek historian
(06:02):
Herodotus and his description of the ancient Persian male courier.
So apparently they did all of this through neither heat
nor rain or whatever it was, and all that gloom.
But yeah, I mean, I guess that's a bit of
a letdown, but it does feel strange that we expect
our electric bills to be delivered during blizzards. I think
they've actually done a pretty decent job of meeting these,
(06:24):
you know, admittedly high expectations. Because there's one other thing
that amazed me while doing the research, and that's just
how versatile an organization the USPS is. So it's grown
right along with the country for hundreds of years, and
it's had to evolve the fifth expanding needs of the public. Yeah,
so well, one of the first major transitions took place
back in eightee, when the USPS first started delivering mail
(06:46):
by train, and so prior to that most deliveries have
been made on horseback or by horse drawn wagon. And
when the mail volume increased, that's when things changed. But
the burgeoning railroad, with its hubs in major cities, that
all allowed the mail to be delivered up and down
the East coast, and the tech changes only increased from there.
So like cars and trucks arrived on the mail scene
(07:07):
in and airplanes soon followed suit in nineteen eleven, I believe, yeah,
and you know, you can still see that kind of
versatility today. According to the Postal Service, they use every
transportation method available to them while making their rounds. I
was looking at a list of the different ways they
deliver mail that include planes, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, subways,
(07:30):
float planes, hovercraft, mules, bicycles, and of course feat I
feel like I should be stunned by hovercrafts, but it's
really mules that's confusing to me. Yeah, it's still on
the list. There's actually one mail by mule route left
in the US, and it's this eight mile trail that
leads down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon where
the Havasupai tribe. They've lived there for over eight hundred years,
(07:53):
and so six days a week the mule train carries
about four thousand pounds of male food supplies and even
for Richard down these steep walls of the canyon. I
was trying to look to see how long this took.
It takes about three hours for the team to get
down there, but it's a five hour trip coming back
up and it happened six days a week. That's so crazy,
and it's amazing that the mail really does go everywhere.
(08:15):
But but you know, there's one delivery method that I'm
kind of bummed is missing from the current list. Pneumatic tubes. Right, So,
before mail trucks took to the streets, the six major
cities I've got these written downs as at Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Brooklyn,
New York, and Chicago, they all made use of underground
networks of pressurized air tubes to deliver their mail. And
(08:38):
at the system's peak in nineteen the city's had a
combined total of over fifty six miles of pneumatic tubes,
all zigzagging beneath the surface. And while these tube systems
start popping up in the U S during the eighteen nineties,
it's actually been used in Europe for almost forty years
by that point. Apparently there were first put to use
in stock exchanges so that traders could communicate messages to
(09:00):
buy or sell stocks, and you know, a faster rate
than telegraph, and it makes sense as a way to
get messages across and the noumatic tubes or what the
banks use, and those are really fast. But you know,
we're talking about a hundred and twenty plus years ago,
so were they actually fast in the eight nineties. Yeah.
The weird thing is they were pretty fast, Like the
male tubes in the U s could move a canister
(09:21):
holding up to six hundred letters an average speed of
thirty five miles per hour. Yeah. So as one example,
uh and their stories of postal workers who worked the
tubes that they were known as rocketeers. But these rocketeers
in downtown New York City actually ordered sandwiches from this
deli up in the Bronx and apparently they'd received their
orders via pneumatic tube within twenty minutes. I want to
(09:42):
order a sandwich by Nematic. That is pretty awesome, although
I'm guessing ordering lunch wasn't officially sanctioned for the use
of the tubes. But so, did you come across any
other weird stuff that was sent by these tubes? Definitely so.
According to an article and written by Robert Cohen for
the USPS website, there was this bizar our opening ceremony
where the first tubes were installed at the General post
(10:03):
Office in New York City and the higher ups they're
basically wanted to show the employees what their new toy
could do. So the very first male canister to travel
the tubes. It contained a Bible, a flag, and a
copy of the Constitution, which is super patriotic. And the
second contained this imitation peach in honor of a Senator
Chauncey Deput. Apparently he was fondly known as the Peach.
(10:26):
Even more patriotic. And the third carrier is the weirdest.
It had a black cat inet a black Oh wow,
that's pretty weird. And as much as I dislike cats,
I really hate the idea of somebody stuffing a cat
into a tube. Was the ket Okay? Yeah, well, well
the cat was fine. It was a little dazed according
to witnesses, but otherwise all right. And sadly though, this
(10:49):
was just the first of many animals to be shot
around New York City through a pressurized tube. So Kenneth Stewart.
He's the author of a Pneumatic Male Tubes and Operation
of Automatic Railroads. He says that plenty of other animals
made the journey to including dogs and mice and roosters,
guinea pigs, monkeys, even some goldfish. Yeah, and in one
(11:09):
of those cases it actually involved sending a sick cat
to the animal hospital, so it was a good use.
But the rest were mostly just examples of postal workers
showing off. I said, it's not this Postal Services proudest moment,
but but I actually don't get it. So animal cruelty aside.
I mean, it sounds like the tubes worked pretty well
in these sprawling city so so why don't we see
(11:29):
New Yorkers and others still using them? Yes, there's actually
a few reasons. One was that the mail volumes kept
increasing and it was simply too much for the tubes
to handle, especially considering the systems pipes were only between
two and eight inches wide. Oh my god, that poor cat.
I can't about that. Yeah, But the main reason is
that most of the tube systems were built and owned
by private companies and and they merely rented to the
(11:52):
Post Office. So, uh, these rental costs just got too
high in the long term. And according to Kate Astor,
who's the author of the work Anatomy of a City, uh,
let me just find this quote. She wrote, by eighteen
the federal government considered the annual rental payments seventeen thousand
dollars per mile per annum made by the Post Office
(12:13):
to be exorbitant, and they endorsed a new alternative with
greater capacity, the automobile as the delivery method of choice. Yeah,
I mean, as sad as it is to see does
go away, I guess it, it makes sense and I
can't deny that thematic tubes and mule trains they do
add this pop of color to the Postal Services history though, Yeah,
totally and in fact, well, why don't we get a
(12:33):
historian online and see what other weird stories are lurking
in the USPS archives? Sounds like a plan. So our
guest today has been with the Smithsonian Institution for over
three decades now, which Mango. I'm pretty sure that makes
her super smart if I'm not mistaken so, but more
(12:53):
importantly for today's episode, she's been curating exhibits at the
National Postal Museum since it opened in nineteen. She's now
the head curator of the history department there. Nancy Pope,
welcome to Part time Genius. Thank you, it's good to
be here. So, Nancy, we've had so much fun digging
into the history of the Postal Service, and we've talked
about all the things like, you know, delivery by mule
(13:14):
and pneumatic tubes and all kinds of stuff. But but
do you have a favorite delivery method that's actually no
longer being used. I have a favorite method that was
used once. What's that? It's missile mail. On June, the
US Navy fired a Regulus one missile off the USS Barbaro,
(13:38):
which was floating out in the Atlantic, and they directed
it to land at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Mayport, Florida.
And instead of having a nuclear weapon on board, they
had two blue and red metal containers that held three
thousand letters. Wow, So so why were they are doing this?
(14:00):
Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was a man who really wanted
to modernize his post office, and he was doing anything
and everything he could do to kind of try that,
and he was trying a lot of silly things. He
thought about missile mail, and he talked to the War Department,
and they had their own little idea that they wanted
(14:22):
to make sure the Russians knew that we were so
good with our missiles that we could direct them to
land anywhere we wanted, and they were so useful that
we could use them too. I don't know carry mail.
The letter that Summerfield since and was one of the
three thousand letters they were actually all the same letters
inside the missile. He says that this is just the beginning,
(14:47):
but um, he's smarter than that, and I think it
was a pr stunt from beginning to end for both
the war and the post Office department. Actually, one of
the other examples I saw was the railway mail crane,
which doesn't seem that exciting at first, but can you
explain how that worked in terms of the trains passing
through towns pretty quickly. In the days of railway mail.
(15:11):
Most of the times the trains would actually stop and
exchange to the mail at a train station, but they
couldn't stop at every single one, you know, most trains
were not milk runs, and so to exchange the mail
at some of these towns, they had to figure out
a way to get the mail bag off and a
mail bag onto the train while the train was moving,
(15:33):
And they came up with these cranes, and the postmaster
would go up and hook a mail bag, a leather
mail bag to this crane, so it was passing at
top and bottom stretched out so it was very tight.
And then the train would come along and the clerk
on the train would be looking out his door and
(15:54):
he had a long iron crane that was attached to
the door, and he'd swing that out. And you could
never swing it out too early because then you knocked
the telephone poles down. But you had to watch out
and be very very careful until you saw the cranes
and you slung your iron crane up and the crane
would actually grab the mail bag and you would pull
(16:16):
the crane back in, and while you're doing this, you
would kick the mail bag full of mails for that
station off the train. So you do it all of
this at once, and you had to kick really hard
because if you didn't, it got sucked under the train
and mail bag would explode letters everywhere. And they called
(16:37):
that a snowfall. Wow, that's pretty actually sounds like could
be pretty dangerous at the same time. But that that's
that's very interesting. So I know the main vehicle used
by the postal service, this Grunman l LV or the
Long Life Vehicle. I read somewhere recently that it gets
an average fuel economy of about ten miles a gallon.
(16:57):
If and if that's the case, what are your thoughts on,
you know, why that vehicle was chosen and why we
haven't seen a move away from that vehicle given how
much fuel must be used in a given week. The
l l V was selected after a test run. What
happened was the Post Office Department UM was tired of
(17:17):
just buying their vehicles off the rocks. They said, we
have very special needs. We're going to list our needs
and then we're going to stay build a vehicle to
those needs. They were put over, you know, horrible ditches.
They were put over cobblestones. They had to stop and start,
stop and start stops, all the things that are a
(17:38):
male vehicle has to do that our regular cars don't.
And the LLLV, the grummin l l V, won the test.
And because they won that test, that's why they were selected.
And they were also selected because they could last twenty
five years. A bigger problem right now is twenty five
years has expired or most of that fleet, and the
(18:02):
Post Office Department very much wants to get new cars,
and they have started bringing in new vehicles um bit
by bit, but it's gonna be you know, millions of
dollars to replace the total LLV fleets it's left. So
let's talk stamps for a second. Are there any historical
(18:23):
figures you feel are overdue for a recognition on the stamp.
I would think Arthur Summerhills should be on a stamp
if he hasn't been yet. And that was the postmaster
general who did the missile mail, just because he came
up with the whole concept of modernizing the post office
department in the fifties, because it had been stuck in
(18:43):
the thirties with no money because of the depression in
the forties, with no money because of World War Two.
So by the fifties they were using thirty year old
trucks that were barely being held together by you know,
spit and glue. Uh, they're mechan there's systems of moving
the mail inside a post office were just antiquated. Everything
(19:08):
was old and i'm stupid and rotten and nothing was
working well. And he came in and basically convinced Congress
to give him a lot of money to modernize things,
and he kick started a whole lot of stuff in
the post office department. Got automation going, computerized sorting systems,
the zip code system, all of that would have never
(19:30):
exists if it wasn't for Summerfield. So, yeah, get him
lot of stamp. Yeah, Well, we'll start the petition. Yeah, yeah, Well,
for all of our listeners that are visiting the Smithsonian
Museums anytime in the near future, we hope you'll check
out the National Postal Museum. It is a fascinating place
to visit. But Nancy, thanks so much for joining us
on part Time Genius. That was my pleasure. You're listening
(20:05):
to part Time Genius, and we're talking about the fascinating
evolution of the US Postal Service. So well, we've mentioned
a few times now that an increase in mail volume
was the main reason for a bunch of the mail
system's major changes, Like it's the reason we switched from
horses to carriages and then from tubes to trucks. And
it's also why the number of post offices bloon from
you know, just seventy five way back in sev over
(20:28):
twenty eight thousand in eighteen sixty. And in fact, this
ever increasing mail volume became the accepted status quo for
over two hundred years, no matter what changes came in
the form of new transportation styles or competing communication systems
like telegraphs or telephones or radios or TVs. Like the
one truth for the postal service was that mail volume
(20:49):
just continued to go up and up. But all of
that changed in two thousand seven, when for the first
time in history, mail started to decline. Yeah, and and
that was the year that the effects of the Internet
really started to catch up to them. And and ever
since then, the net mail volume flowing through the system
is decreased every single year. And it's a big problem
for the agency, especially being a self funded agency, because
(21:12):
any decrease in mail is a decrease in revenue exactly.
And at the same time, the public still expects to
receive mail every day of the week at any address
in the country. This has led to the postal Service
having to increase its number of delivery points, which opposites
operating costs even as profits steadily shrink. It's it's you know,
it's not all gloom and doom, though I was. I
(21:32):
was reading this article on upworthy that proposed an interesting solution.
You know. They were looking at their their financial woes
and trying to come up with things to do, and
there's the idea for post offices to start offering financial services,
things like check cashing and payday loans. It's roughly thirty
five million American households rely on alternative financial services like
that instead of traditional banking, and since they currently have
(21:55):
to go through private institutions, you know, for these different
kinds of services, it can wind up cost way more
money than it should. In fact, according to a report
released by the USPS, Americans spend the total of about
eighty nine billion dollars on interest and fees from these
alternative financial services. This was from back in two thousand twelve,
which is crazy, right, it really is. But but see,
(22:16):
if post offices were allowed to compete in that market,
they could undercut the competition, save millions for Americans and
secure this nice new revenue stream in the process. At
least that's the hope, and and it seems like a
win win and and not that far fetched the concept.
I mean, post offices already offer some banking services like
selling money orders and cashing treasury checks. Yeah, you know,
(22:37):
really the main thing preventing this from happening, it would
be the banks themselves. They have an awful lot of
clout and government and of course they don't like the
idea of a public institution muscling into their territory. But
who knows. I mean, if the situation continues to worsen
for the USPS, those voices of opposition might cease to
carry as much sway. Yeah, and the good news is
that history is on the postal services side, so it's
(22:59):
faced some any dire challenges in the past, and it's
always smuddled through. I mean, if you need any evidence
of the resilience of the USPS, you just have to
look at zip codes. That's a good point. And there's
definitely an aspect of mail we take for granted. So
so actually I think we should spend a little time
talking about zip codes, sure, so we can give a
little background on it. For starters. Zip codes are a
(23:20):
much more recent innovation than you'd guess. Although they were
first developed as this time saving tool to help understaff
post offices, and this was during World War Two, they
weren't actually putting to use until twenty years later in ninete.
And this was a time before the Postal Service was
self funding. It's still received the bulk of its funds
from Congress, but in the mid sixties Congress wasn't supplying
(23:42):
enough cash to keep up with the post war mail boom. Yeah,
and post offices wanted new sorting machines so they could
finally automate the process instead of continuing to wage this
really unwinnable war that was hand sorting at the time.
But Congress thought they were making a big deal out
of nothing. I mean, after all, they had handled mail
the old fashioned way for over a century at this point,
so as they saw, you know, why fix what isn't broken,
(24:04):
except it was broken. I mean. The proof finally came
in October of nineteen sixty six, and that's the month
when a combination of election mailings and holiday season advertisements
they totally clogged the system. It was like a mail
fat burg. And then the whole thing came to a
staff like the Chicago Post Office, which was the largest
in the country at the time, halted mail delivery for
(24:25):
a full three weeks while they tried to make sense
of this volume and and all these letters and parcels
that needed to be sorted. I mean, the whole thing
led Congress back to the move to automation, And at
the center of it all was this old zip code idea,
which was finally taken off the shelf and put into action.
And with the new machinery and the advent of zip codes,
postal workers were able to sort up to thirty thousand
(24:47):
letters an hour, which was nearly ten times as many
as a single worker could sort by hand in the
same amount of time, which I find almost as baffling
that a single worker was previously able to sort three thousand.
I know, us unbelievable, but obviously this was a huge,
huge improvement. But I do think we should take a
second to explain the role ZIP codes played in that process, because,
(25:09):
you know, as often as we're exposed the ZIP codes,
I feel like most of us don't really know that
much about them, or that they're actually an acronym. ZIP
stands for Zoning Improvement Plan. Yeah, and and the name
really does say at all. So the numbers were part
of the plan to improve the way that mail was
sorted by address, and a ZIP code specified which region
or zone of the country to which a piece of
(25:29):
mail should be sent. And instead of hand sorting letters
by city address, which obviously took a good deal of
time in some cases and required, you know, knowledge of geography,
machines were able to electronically scan the short string of
numbers and sort the mail using that coded information. Yeah,
and that's another thing that I think most of us
don't really understand is what exactly those five numbers means.
(25:50):
So I'll just explain that. So, the first digit represents
the region where the address is located. So for the
purposes of zip codes, the country split into ten zones.
You start on the East coast, and then you increase
that number as you move across to the west coast.
So you know, Maine and New York have zip codes
that start with zero and one, Maryland's a two, and
(26:11):
then you go all the way across the country. You
get to California and Washington and they begin with the
number nine. That's pretty awesome. And and I'm guessing the
other four digits specify the location of an address even
further Yep, they get even more specific, so that the
second two digits correspond to a smaller area of the
country and and the central postal facility that services that region,
and then the final two digits signify the actual local
(26:33):
post office that delivers to that given address. But to me,
the best part of it was that the USPS had
this advertising campaign they launched in the sixties to raise
awareness of the new system. Oh that's so, there was
this little jingle used to promote it or something like that. Yeah,
and that's underselling it a bit. So it was actually
this fifteen minute musical p s A performed by none
(26:54):
other than the Swinging Six Swinging I love that. It
was fifteen minutes. My god, I know. And and there's
no way to do this thing justice by talking about it.
You really need to YouTube it. But the short of
it is that the Postal Service financed this incredibly campy
video as a means of like selling the public on
the importance of ZIP codes and how it was going
(27:14):
to make everything speedier and more efficient. And they also
created this new cartoon mascot named Mr Zip and that
really helped drive home the point as well. I remember
Mr Zip, that creepy little male man stick figured And
they kind of went all out with this campaign. I mean,
they really had no faith in the American public to
write these five extra digits to they apparently not. But
(27:35):
Mr Zip in the Swinging Six like, they really caught
on and and Mr Zip became something of a pop
culture icon in his own right. He appeared on magazines
and mail trucks and television and radio ads and even
on things like lunch boxes. But but of course, the
surest sign of mr Zip's success was that by seventy
which was really just seven years after the start of
(27:57):
the campaign, zip code use had risen to let me
find these numbers eighty six percent nationwide, and by seventy
nine it had climbed to nine. I mean, those are
pretty solid results, and it does make you feel for
mr Zip a little bit. I mean, he seems that
played a pretty big role in all of this. Kind
of the uh I don't know, like the smokey bear
(28:17):
of the postal service, but you don't find him anywhere
these days. I know he's hanging out with Clippy for Microsoft,
but I feel like you're preaching to acquire here. You
know what's weird, though, is that the USPS actually did
try out one other mascot before mr Zip and it's
kind of a weird story. But before we get into it,
let's break for a quiz. Okay man goes So, when
(28:44):
we put out a call for listeners to let us
know if they wanted to come on and play a quiz,
one of them wrote in and it's actually a mail carrier,
which is perfect for today's episode. I know, it's so awesome, alright, so,
Sarah Hofferbert, welcome to Part Time Genius. Hi, thank you
so much, Sarah. Where are you you delivering mail today?
I'm in Rochester, New York today? Okay, all right, I
(29:04):
assume that's where you deliver mail every day around the city,
different places yet, okay? And how long have you been
a and and his mail carrier? The correct term? What
is the official title? My my My job title is
that I'm a letter carrier, but mail carriers just just fine? Okay?
And how long have you been doing this? About four years? Okay?
All right, Well, thank you for writing in. We're We're
(29:26):
glad you're a regular listener of Part Time Genius, and
so we are going to put you to the test. Mango.
What is our quiz called today? It's called going Postal
and it's a true false quiz. If you know everything
about the post office is history, it should be pretty easy, alright.
You know every single thing about the history of the
post office. There's nothing I don't know. All right, confidence,
(29:48):
here we go. We're gonna read you a statement and
all you need to do is tell us whether it's
true or false. You ready to go? Yes? Okay? Question
number one, the first post office in Colonial America was
in a bar. That is true. Exactly, you're right. So
it was set up in sixteen thirty nine and operated
out of the Boston home in tavern of Richard Fairbanks,
(30:11):
where he liked to serve glasses of strong water. Excellent,
All right, she has one for one, okay, Sarah. Question
number two. In Luxembourg, the post office trained Saint Bernard's
to carry letters to homes, but the system only lasted
a month thanks to the city's squirrel population. That sounds
like something I would want to be true, But yeah,
(30:32):
you're right. I mean, it's not a totally crazy idea,
because Belgium did try delivering mail by cats for a
little bit that that was a total disaster. Okay, okay,
so far, Sarah, you're delivering this is great. Question number three.
In Victorian London, mail was delivered twelve times a day.
That is also true. She's amazing at this. Yeah, mail
(30:55):
was treated more like instant messenger back then, when people
actually like sent immediate sponsors back and they get upset
if you didn't respond. Okay, alright, two left, She's three
for three so far. Question number four. When Harry Winston
donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian in nineteen It
was actually sent via US mail. True or faults. I
(31:16):
want to say that's true. It is true. So they
sent it by first class mail for just two dollars
and forty four cents and the Smithsonian still has the packaging. Wow,
and how much was that worth? Three million dollars? Any
a little bit of insurance on that? That is incredible.
All right, we are four for four. Coming up with
the last question. Let's see if Sarah can score perfect.
Let's see all right, question number five. Ben Franklin was
(31:39):
so obsessed with yams as a tasty snack that in
the winter he insisted that every mail carrier received a warm,
grilled yam before servicing their route through or faults. That
would be delicious in the winter. But I want to
say that's false. That's amazing. You an incredible five for five. Yeah.
I wanted that one to be true so much. But mango.
(32:02):
But alright, so Sarah went an incredible five for five.
What does she want today? So? Uh, Sarah actually gets
an official part time genius Certificate of Genius, which we're
we're just making and she's gonna be the first recipient
all right, we will send that to you. Yeah, we
will send that to you and the male safe travels
on your route today. And thanks again for joining us,
Thank you for having me. Alright, Mango, So you were
(32:37):
talking about this other postal mascot before the break, So,
so what's weird about it? Well, for for starters, the
mascot was a dog, which is a surprising choice for
postal workers given the history between the two. All Right, well,
I know you're usually the tangent person, but I feel
like I want to go on one here as well,
because I was actually kind of curious about the deal
with dogs and postal workers, so I was looking into
(32:59):
it a little bit, and and actually this psychology of
having their turf invaded and understanding why they always go
after the postal workers. So the situations made way worse
by the fact that the mail carriers keep coming day
in and day out, and and that's something I had
not really thought about before. So it reinforces the idea
that the dog needs to defend its territory. And you know,
(33:20):
because the carriers do eventually walk away from the home,
the dog feels rewarded and it's likely to repeat that
same behavior next time. It's basically the definition of a
vicious cycle, and a major emphasis on the vicious part
here because actually I was looking at the numbers. According
to the USPS, more than six thousand of its mail
carriers are attacked by dogs each man. That's terrible, and
(33:43):
I'm actually glad I get to talk about this mascot now.
It's it's a nice throwback to these days when dogs
and postal workers were actually friends. But uh, at least
that was the case with this particular dog named Ony
that was the actual dog. Is that this is a
real dog? Owny? Yeah, so only was a stray mutt
who started joining a mail clerk on his morning walk. Uh.
(34:04):
This was in Albany, New York, way back in and
this morning routine gradually led to any hanging out at
the office during the day, and he became friends with
other postal clerks, and he also developed this strange affinity
for the texture of mail bags, both the texture and
the smell. And once his clerk pal moved away, the
other mail clerks took him in and from there only
(34:26):
started following his beloved mail bags onto mail wagons and trains,
and he rode with the bags in the post office
train cars traveling all over the country and later all
over the world, and all these railroad workers were cool
with some random dog just traveling around with him. Yeah,
apparently they loved Onny. So train wrecks were really common
at the time, but no train ever crashed with one
(34:48):
on board. And he kind of became this good luck
charm for the railway mail clerks and this unofficial mascot
whose many travels were marked by people placing medals and
tags on his collar. That's really sweet. But so did
you get to keep one of the mail bags when
he retired? No, so that this story actually has kind
of a sad ending. So Oney never made it to retirement.
(35:08):
In June, only boarded a mail train for Toledo, Ohio.
And while only was making his rounds and you know,
greeting all these people in Toledo, one postal clerk showed
him do a newspaper reporter and the full details have
never been investigated, but supposedly only became ill tempered and
he was shot on June. God MANO, that really took
(35:28):
a turn there, I know. But like I said, we
don't really know that full details, but we do know
that the mail clerks were totally devastated. They took up
this collection and used the money to have only preserved
and today visitors to the National Postal Museum in Washington,
d C. Can actually see one on display, still wearing
his harness and some of his favorite tags. That's pretty neat. Well,
(35:49):
I guess that's about as happy of an inning as
you can get with a story like that. But honestly,
I'm glad to hear they put his remains in the
museum instead of just stuffing him in one of those
thematic twos we were talking about earlier. Yeah, I mean
only never traveled by two, but there are plenty of
animals who make trips by mail even today. You know.
I saw that, like, apparently live scorpions are totally fine
(36:09):
to mail, and you know, as long as they're to
be used for medical or anti venom research. I don't
know how you prove that, but that's those are the
reasons you can mail them, and they're clearly marked as
live scorpions. Also saw that baby alligators are mailable too,
as long as they're under twenty. This all feels totally
crazy to me, but but by the way, my my
favorite animal by mail story is the one about this
(36:31):
guy in Ohio who mailed his pet chameleon to Florida
so they could have a warmer place to live. He
was worried a little guy wouldn't make it through the
cold winter in Ohio, so he slipped the lizard into
this pre stamped envelope and mailed it off to the
Sunshine State. So did this Did the chameleon make it? Yeah?
The sender had requested that he'd be informed when his
pet arrived, and sure enough, Orlando's postmaster obliged. He responded, Uh,
(36:54):
let me find this, Dear David. I received your chameleon
yesterday and he was immediately released on the post office grounds.
Best wishes for a merry Christmas. That's an animal in
the mail story. Alright. You know, still as weird as
mailing around chameleons and alligators and scorpions as it's it's
nothing compared to mailing actual people, which I know we
(37:16):
both saw in our research has actually happened. I know
I was hoping this would come off. So there's such
a long successful history of people sending themselves and each
other through the mail, and as far as we know,
the first person to travel by mail was baby James Beagle.
He was this eight month old boy whose parents mailed
him to his grandmother a few miles away. Eight months old,
(37:36):
I know a baby Graham. And this was just a
few weeks after the Postal Service began transporting larger parcels
rather than just letters or magazines, so it really didn't
take long for someone to try mailing a human. Apparently,
the main appeal was that postage was way cheaper than
a train ticket. Baby James's travel apparently only cost his
parents fifteen cents and stints, though to be fair they
(37:57):
did spring for fifty dollars and insured nice the parents
of the year right there. But you're right though, mailing
yourself is definitely an inexpensive way to travel. I was
reading about this professional javelin thrower from Australia's name was
Red Spears, and in nineteen sixty four he went up
stranded in England after failing to make the cut for
the English Olympic team. He was all set to return
(38:18):
home and then his wallet was stolen and so he
was left flat broken without any way back to Australia.
His solution, I'll seal himself in a small crate and
actually mail himself cash on delivery. So how long was
he in there? I think it was like a three
day trip and all. And this this includes this particularly
toasty layover and Mumbai where you know, his limited provisions
(38:40):
and makeshift bathroom slash water bottle. I mean, these things
were stretched to their limits on this three day trip.
And in the end though, the plan worked and he
made it safely back to Australia. Of course, reporters quickly
caught wind of this embarrassing ordeal, but Spears even managed
to turn that to his advantage. The airline itself took
pity on him forgave his dad. He even went on
(39:01):
to co author a book about the experience. It was titled,
of course, out of the Box. That's pretty great. But
my favorite story of all time of someone shifting himself
in a box has to be Henry Box Brown, the
slave who mailed himself to freedom. Oh that's a good one. Yeah,
you should tell this story definitely. So in Eine Brown
escaped his master's property in Virginia and with the help
(39:23):
of some abolitionists, he mailed himself across state lines to
the free state of Pennsylvania. It cost him eighty six dollars,
which is a little more than today, and the trip
lasted a miserable twenty seven hours, but it actually went
off without a hitch. The next day, Brown was successfully
delivered to Freedom, and he went on to become a
well known entertainer and abolitionist speaker in his later life.
(39:46):
And that was all thanks to the U S. Mail System. Man, Well,
if that's not a ringing endorsement for the USPS, I'm
honestly not sure what is. Yeah, but what do you
say we now honor one of our own sacred institutions
with a good old fashioned fact. Yeah, I'll start with
(40:10):
the story about how a stamp was used to do
some serious trash talking and almost started a war. In
the nineteen thirties, Nicaragua's postal service put out a stamp
that featured a map of Nicaragua. The stamp also showed
Honduras north of Nicaragua's border, but instead of just letting
it be, the stamp labeled the territory quote territory in dispute.
And this was despite the fact that the territory issues
(40:32):
have been settled thirty years earlier. When the stamps first
started arriving with mail and Honduras people started rioting and
a mob showed up at the Nicaraguan embassy, and after
both countries sent troops to the border, the US and
Mexico actually had to interview in just to prevent the war.
All right, this is pretty different one. So ever, wonder
where the mail goes when it's the term that it
(40:53):
cannot be delivered and the postal service doesn't know where
to return it to. It's actually not far at all
from where we're sitting right now. This is to the
Mail Recovery Center here in Atlanta. So sadly it took
on this name in nine when its name was changed
from what had been the Dead Letter Office, which I
just love so much more. But the MRC then auctions
(41:13):
off these items of value, not not individually. They're actually
sold as these big groups of things. So there have
even been entire tractor trailers of books sold as an example.
That's kind of awesome. So I was looking at some
stats on junk mail. The amount of junk mail received
by all American households in the US each year is
the equivalent of about hundred million trees, and junk mail
(41:34):
manufacturing creates the equivalent of three point seven million cars
in greenhouse gas emissions. Alright, So, hikers in Nevada and
Utah and other areas of these vast landscapes have been
puzzled by these huge concrete arrows on the ground. But
if you were to fly over these arrows, you'd actually
see that they're part of this cross country path of arrows.
(41:55):
So in the nies, Congress approved the creation of a
nearly three thousand mile line of the seventy foot long
yellow concrete arrows, stretching from New York to San Francisco.
They're about ten miles apart, and the purpose was to
give pilots of the time away to navigate safely across
the various thirteen stops from coast to coast, which is
actually awesome. So until the nineteen sixties, most college students
(42:19):
actually mailed their dirty clothes home to mom to wash,
and this was until washing machines became more common. It
was also expected that mom would send your clean underwear
back with a fresh batch of cookies. I'm kind of
hoping my mom's not listening to this, because because I
still send my clothes home to mom, I don't want
her to know that most people don't do this anymore,
but I gotta admit it. That's a great fact. So
(42:40):
I'm gonna have to give you this fact off. Congratulations. Now,
if we missed any of your favorite postal service facts,
you can email us as always part Time Genius at
how stuff Works dot com or call seven Fact hot
Line one eight four four pt Genius. It is still
seven right, mengo. Okay, that's great. Well, thank you guys
so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time
(43:15):
Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't
be possible without several brilliant people who do the important
things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does
the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and
does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the
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(43:37):
your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard,
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