Catching the Mail on the Fly

Mid-Week at Work: Delivering the mail 1940

The end of Saturday mail delivery

In the category of trends, the U.S. Post Office has announced that it intends to end the Saturday delivery of mail. This move will save the Post Office a great deal of money.  No doubt that's true, and the move can come as no surprise.

Rural mail carrier transferring mail to a second mail carrier, in Kentucky, in the early 1940s.

The surprising thing this go around, as this has been suggested before, is how this is now coming without a whimper or hint of complaint from the general public.  It just is.  This really shows a huge evolution in how we view the mail, as well as a big evolution in how the mail itself is viewed.

When I was a little kid, and at home from school for the summer, I used to really look forward to the mail.  It seems odd to look back at now and realize that.  The mail coming was sort of exciting.  There was "junk mail" then, and bills of course, but I didn't worry about the bills or the junk. The exciting stuff was the other stuff.  Magazines and letters.  My mother in particular wrote a lot of letters and received a lot of letters.  She had family correspondence that went all over. Letters from Canada, Florida, Massachusetts, Mexico and Hawaii were always arriving.  And the magazines were pretty interesting too.  My father, for his office, subscribed to both major news magazines of the period, Time and Newsweek, as well as Life, Look, and later on, People.  National Geographics, and a host of monthly magazines also arrived almost daily it seemed.

Rural mail carrier in Kentucky, 1940s.

Later, when I was in basic training, Mail Call was a huge deal.  Every mail call we hoped for some mail.  Letters were a great distraction from whatever else we were doing at Ft. Sill,and they were eagerly anticipated.

Such was also the case when I was twice at the University of Wyoming.  While in law school I had post office box at the campus post office, and I checked it darned near every week day.  Sometimes I checked it on Saturdays too, particularly if I was going to the early Mass at the Newman Center, which took me right by the post office.  Letters from family and the few magazines I received were always looked forward to.

Now this is much less the case. We still get magazines that we subscribe to by mail, and look forward to them.  Newsweek is gone, of course, now part of the Daily Beast online, as are Look and Life magazines. The National Geographic still comes, and some others. But the letters are mostly gone.  Getting a letter, by mail, is now almost a shock, it's so rare.

Almost all my correspondence is electronic.  All the friends I keep in touch with via correspondence I keep in touch with via email.  I don't even mail Christmas cards anymore, I just do an electronic Christmas letter.  The old vast flood of correspondence the mail used to bring is now all gone, a massive change over former times.  The mail now is made up of magazines, junk mail, and bills.  But even bills are slowly leaving the mail, as more and more people pay for things online.

This blog has, as one of is purposes, exploring the change in things over the past century, and here's a huge one indeed. The mail used to be absolutely central to people's lives.  Now, this is hardly the case.  There are some days we don't even check our mailbox out in front of our house, which is something that never would have been the case earlier.  Down at the office mail is still huge, of course, but even this is beginning to change.  We used to mail pleadings to every court.  Now we electronically file and serve in Federal court, and we also do the same for the Wyoming Supreme Court.  Ironically here, therefore, the Federal government's courts were the first to abandon the United States Post Office, in the legal world.

This trend is set to continue, there's no doubt. The Post Office is only accepting the inevitable, but the interesting thing this go around is that most people don't seem to care.  Shutting down Saturday delivery has been a topic of discussion forever.  Now it will happen, and it seems that most won't notice. 

Mail. . .. and Junk Mail

Mail is one of those classic and perennial subjects of conversation.  Like the weather, everyone has an opinion on the mail.  Usually the opinion is the same one that has seemingly always existed. . . that the mail is slow and everything in it is bad.  By and large, that's a pretty unfounded opinion but it doesn't seem to vary much over time.

A classic example of this is something once overheard by my son in the barber shop.  A couple of older gentlemen were in the barbershop waiting their turns and discussing the mail.  One complained that the German postal service could move a letter clear across Germany in a day and there was no reason that the US Postal Service should not be able to do something similar.

Well, the Post Office does do something similar to that every day.  Germany's geography consists of 137,847 square miles.  Wyoming's geography consists of 97,814 square miles.  Mailing a letter from one place in Wyoming to another, overnight, is not hard to do, and that's about the same mileage a typical German letter would put in.  This was probably all the more case in the complainers case as his time in Germany likely came before German reunification when the square mileage of the BDU was less than that of Wyoming.  The Unites States, as a whole, consists of 3,794,083 square miles, and obviously moving a letter from one place in the US overnight may be a much more difficult matter.

In other words, people, in part, like to complain about the mail.

Which is not to say that the mail hasn't changed over the years.  One thing I was recently surprised to learn is that in at least the UK twice daily mail delivery was the norm in the early part of the 20th Century and it was common to mail a card in the morning and have it delivered in the afternoon, an impressive feat.  This is the reason that there are so many photo cards from the early 20th Century.  Average people, and businesses, used them for short messages.  Sort of like having a fancy email signature, using a photo card was a little spiffier way of sending a message.  Photo cards were extremely common, and existed on all topics, including news, travel, and politics.  Even radical organizations had photo cards, designed not only to serve as messages for their adherents, but basically as advertisements for their causes.Of course, then as now, people also collected them to.  But probably the chance to get a photo card, which many of these were, added a bit of happy anticipation to receiving mail.

As twice daily mail delivery might infer, mail delivery was an extremely important governmental function at one time (and really still is).  Delivering the mail is one of the duties of the United States government that's specifically referenced in the U.S. Constitution, putting it up there with providing for the nation's defense.  Indeed, its one of the task that the US took on right from the onset.

Early postal delivery was a daunting tasks.  Now forgotten the Post Office was in effect one of the nations' early "mounted services", in that much mail was delivered by mounted men.  This was so much the case that it is claimed that the etymology of the equestrian term "posting" comes from postal riders.  Posting is the practice of "rising to the trot", as opposed to "sitting the trot" in which a rider rises to the beat of the trot, a practice which generally makes the trot easier for the rider to do and which also provides some relief for the horse.  Whether posting actually comes from postal riders is not undisputed, but it at least there's some basis to make that assertion.

Seal of the former United States Post Office Department, the predecessor to the United States Postal Service.

Moving the mail was so important to the country that being Post Master General was a cabinet level position in the US Government from 1872 to 1971, when the Department was converted into the Postal Service. Few people probably recall that change now, but it was a real one.  I'm actually pretty surprised to learn that the elevation to a full cabinet position came in 1872, however, as that would seem rather late.  Still, having said that, I suppose that delivering the mail in the vast West at that time must have been a chore of epic proportions.  It's a forgotten one too.  For example, an historical oddity is that one of the government installations near Independence Rock, during its 19th Century hay-day, was a post office.  People remember the forts and what not, but they don't remember the post office.

I suppose the importance of mail started to diminish slightly with the telegraph, and then the telephone, but not much really.  It's the Internet and Email that's really cut into the importance of the mail.  Not that mail isn't important, but it's declining in importance nearly every day.  Offices still send out vast quantities of mail, however, and the law in particular relies on the mail as many types of legal instruments and documents must be "served" by mail.  A ritual in any law office is the daily sorting, stamping, and delivering of the days' mail, followed by the daily mailing out of pleadings and notices. The law, however, is generally a slow adapter of new technologies.  Electronic communications are making their inroads here too now, and now Federal Courts use electronic filing, as system by which all pleadings in actions are filed electronically.  The Federal Pacer system also sends out the notice of filings as well, which replaces the requirement that lawyers mail out pleadings.  So far only the Wyoming Supreme Court has done something similar, with other Wyoming state courts retaining the mailing and hard copy requirements.  It's only a matter of time, however, before all state courts in the US use some variant of electronic filing.  I'd be very surprised if I was still filing hard copies of pleadings, and mailing the service copies, a decade from now.\

Of course, part of what everyone has received in the mail for many years is "junk".  "Junk mail" is the term loosely used for advertisements.  It should be regarded as pretty loose of term, however, as a lot of people are looking forward to some of that junk.  Catalogs and advertisements may be unwelcome to some, but many look forward to those very things, and cringe at the other major thing that the Postal Carrier delivers, that being bills.

Its interesting to note that junk mail is an unwelcome aspect of mail that Email not only managed to catch up with, but to really surpass the old written mail with.  On most days I get a few advertisements in my home mail, and I get a few every couple of days in my work mail, although quite frequently the work advertisement mail is relevant to what I'm doing and isn't really all junk by any means.  But my Email, particularly my work email, is amazingly full of junk mail.  And junk mail, as any Emailer knows, is derisively known as Spam, a name that the makers of the canned meat by that name are probably less than thrilled with.

The real Spam.

Spam, the electronic kind, is really irritating.  It's at least as irritating as junk mail ever was, and arguably its much more irritating.  Spammers bombard my work email with junk every day, and with repeated emails using the same bogus email addresses.  As a result, I've reset my Spam Filter on my email from Stun to Kill, and now most of it gets weeded out, thank goodness.  I hope for a day when Spam Filters will be so efficient that Spam will die off, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.  Indeed, I'd like the Spam filters to hunt the perpetrators down, leap out of their computer screens, and hurl cans of Spam at them.

Most irritating of all the Spam, and the one that seems to come into my work email the most frequently, are those that purport to somehow be business related, or which closely mimic real email that a person might receive. For example, I get fake Amazon spam fairly often.  I know when I've ordered something from Amazon, so I don't click on them, but it's irritating.  Likewise, for awhile I got piles of them purporting to be from the IRS, even though I know very well that the IRS does not send out official information by email.  Others mimic banks, or other business institutions.

Oddly, some of these purport to be from people at these institutions, which are the most bizarre of them all. Probably a very high percentage of these Spam emails originate overseas, and they contain either malicious viruses or some sort of nasty tracking program of some sort.  They're dangerous. But they're sort of amusing at the same time, as apparently the Spammers in Russia or Nigeria, or wherever, think the average American has a very unusual name.  Just the other day, for example, I got one that purported to be from ArmandRosenberg, or soemthing like that.  Armand?  Unusual names like that are common for these.  There will be things like SpankadorVonLudwig, or ZiangchwoSpencer.  Apparently Spammers spend a lot of time watching American television in which names are, indeed, sometimes odd.

Anyhow, it's extremely frustrating.  I almost miss the day when junk mail was limited to catalogs and mailings that I could just toss, rather than electronic Spam I have to filter out in vast quantities, some of which probably contain viruses and all of which I wish to avoid.  Even bloggers, such as we, have to worry about the occasional spam attempt as a comment to this and our other sites.  We love it when we get comments, but every few months there's one where some poster claims to love the site and wants to direct to his own time share in the Caribbean, or something, site. 

It was refreshing, therefore, when some I twice received mail from a local car franchise a couple of weeks ago that had hit upon the idea of sending out envelopes with no return address, and their add, with a sticky note attached addressed to a household member's first name.  It looked oddly personal, even though it was apparent it was not. Still, it came by mail, and it didn't contain a virus.

What one building says about the march of history.

This is the Ewing T. Kerr Federal Courthouse in Casper, Wyoming. I recently posted these photographs of it on my courthouse blog.

In doing this, it occurred to me that this building, in many ways, symbolizes how many changes have come about in the last 80 years.

This building was built under appropriations set out in 1926, but actual construction did not start until 1931. It was completed in 1932. The building, therefore, came early in the Great Depression.

The ceremony for the corner stone included a Masonic Ceremony. That's an amazing fact in and of itself. A Masonic Ceremony would be regarded as unthinkable now for a Federal event, and it probably generated some concern amongst the Catholic lawyers in town at the time. The Masons, however, were quite powerful in Casper in this era, and of course fraternal organizations of all type were much more common then as opposed to now.

The building itself was not built with just the judiciary in mind. Indeed, there was no sitting Federal judge for it at all. At the time, there was one Federal judge who sat in Cheyenne. He was, however, a bit of a circuit rider, and Federal courthouses existed in Cheyenne, Casper, Green River, Lander and Yellowstone National Park. The courtroom was on the second floor of the courthouse, and the main floor and part of the basement housed the Post Office. Service recruiters were also located here, along with other Federal officers. The building was built with this in mind, and it served in this fashion up until about 1970 when a new much larger Federal office building was constructed. This itself shows how much smaller the Federal government actually was, as there is no way this building could serve in this fashion today. Even as late as the early 80s, however, the building still housed various Federal offices, including the United States Geological Survey, for which I briefly worked. It's odd to think that the dingy basement USGS office was once located in what is now a very nice courthouse. Even odder yet is to recall the beautiful Depression Era murals that were once on the main floor, with the mail boxes. The murals depicted scenes of Western migration, and were removed to the new post office (which is now the old post office) when the post office went to the new Federal Building in 1970.

What this courthouse did not see by that time was very much use as a court. By the 1950s at least the Federal Court made little use of this courthouse, and the ones in Green River and Lander had fallen into near complete disuse. In part, this may simply have been due to advances in transportation and technology. The addition of additional Federal judges, however, meant that the court needed to once again use this courthouse, and it was remodeled in the late 1980s and now has a sitting Federal judge.

Even the name of the building illustrates a change. This building was simply called "the Post Office" by most people here when I was young. Later, it was called "the old Post Office". When it acquired a sitting Federal judge most people started calling it The Federal Courthouse. The official name, the Ewing T. Kerr Federal Courthouse, came about in honor of long time Wyoming Federal judge, Ewing T. Kerr. Judge Kerr is notable, amongst other reasons, for being the last Wyoming Federal judge to lack a law degree. He had never attended law school, and actually started off as a teacher. He "read the law" and passed the bar.

By the way, just behind the courthouse is the old First National Bank building. It hasn't been used in that fashion during my lifetime, I think, but was a major office building up until the 1970s. It then fell into disuse, and was abandoned for many years. Very recently, it was remodeled into appointments, and where the bank lobby once was a grocery store now is.

Also, this view is considerably more open than at any time prior to the present time. A small building neighboring the courthouse was recently removed so that room could be made for parking. They heavy iron fence serves a security purpose. Up until recently this also did not exist, showing, I suppose, how things have changed in another fashion.

Friday, September 10, 1909. Mean dogs and the mail.

The U.S. Post Office excused letter carriers from delivering mail to residences with vicious dogs.

Kitchener in 1910.

Lord Kitchener was promoted to Field Marshal after completing his reorganization of forces in India.

Last edition:

Thursday, September 9, 1909. Chinese National Library established.

Monday, May 31, 1909. Memorial Day.

It was Memorial Day for 1909.

Postmen paraded in Jersey City.

 President Taft spoke at Gettysburg.

We are gathered at this historic spot to-day to dedicate a monument to the memory of the officers and the enlisted men of the Regular Army who gave up their lives for their country in the three days' battle. It is but a tardy recognition of the Nation's debt to its brave defenders whose allegiance was purely to the Nation, without local color or strengthening of State or municipal pride.

The danger of a standing army, entertained by our ancestors, is seen in the constitutional restrictions and the complaints registered in the Declaration of Independence. It has always been easy to awaken prejudice against the possible aggressions of a regular army and a professional soldiery, and correspondingly difficult to create among the people, that love and pride in the army which we find to-day and frequently in the history of the country aroused on behalf of the navy. This has led to a varied and changeable policy in respect to the regular army. At times it has been reduced to almost nothing. In 1784, there were but eighty men who constituted the regular army of the United States, and in Battery F of the 4th Artillery were fifty-five of them; but generally the absolute necessities in the defense of the country against the small wars, which embrace so large a part of our history, have induced the maintenance of a regular force, small to be sure, but one so well trained and effective as always to reflect credit upon the Nation.

In the War of 1812, had we had a regular army of 10,000 men, trained as such an army would have been, we should have been spared the humiliation of the numerous levies of untrained troops and the enormous expense of raising an army on paper of 400,000 or 500,000 men, because with an effective force of 10,000 men, we might have promptly captured Canada and ended the war.

The service rendered by the regular army in the Mexican War was far greater in proportion than that which it rendered in the Civil War, and the success which attended the campaigns of Taylor and of Scott were largely due to that body of men.

To the little army of 25,000 men that survived the Civil War, we owe the opening up of the entire western country. The hardships and the trials of frontier Indian campaigns, which made possible the construction of the Pacific railroads, have never been fully recognized by our people, and the bravery and courage and economy of force compared with the task performed shown by our regular troops have never been adequately commemorated by Congress or the Nation.

To-day, as a result of the Spanish War, the added responsibilities of our new dependencies in the Philippines, Porto Rico, and for some time in Cuba, together with a sense of the importance of our position as a world power, have led to the increase of our regular army to a larger force than ever before in the history of the country, but not larger in proportion to the increase in population and wealth than in the early years of the Republic. It should not be reduced.

The profession of arms has always been an honorable one, and under conditions of modern warfare, it has become highly technical and requires years of experience and study to adapt the officers and men to its requirements. The general purpose of Congress and the American people, if one can say there is a plan or purpose, is to have such a nucleus as a regular army that it may furnish a skeleton for rapid enlargement in time of war to a force ten or twenty times its size, and at the same time be an appropriate instrument for accomplishing the purposes of the government in crises likely to arise, other than a war.

At West Point, we have been able to prepare a body of professional soldiers, well trained, to officer an army, and numerous enough at the opening of the Civil War to give able commanders to both sides of that internecine strife.

Upon the side of the North many of the officers were drafted to command the volunteer troops from the States, while the regular army, aggregating about 10,000 at the opening of the war, was increased to about 25,000 during its first year. More than half this army was engaged in the Battle of Gettysburg. Eleven regiments of infantry, five regiments of cavalry, twenty-six batteries of artillery, and three battalions of engineers. The infantry of the regular army were embraced in two brigades of the Third Division of the Fifth Corps under Major-General Sykes, himself a most able regular army officer. The cavalry was included in a Reserve Division under General Merritt, and the batteries were distributed among various army corps of the entire Federal force.

Two of the most important and determining crises of the three days' battle were, first, the seizure of the Round Tops and the maintenance of the Federal control over that great point of vantage, the possession of which by the Confederate forces would have taken the whole Federal line in the reverse; and the second was the resistance to Pickett's charge on the third day of the battle when the high point in the Confederate advance into Pennsylvania was turned, and Lee was defeated and hurried back into Southern territory, never again to plant his Confederate battle-flags on Northern soil. The taking of the Round Tops and the driving back of the Confederate forces was the work of Sykes' Fifth Army Corps, and especially of the two brigades of the Regular Infantry regiments, in which in killed and wounded alone the regulars lost 20 per cent, of their full number, and some of their brigades, notably Burbank's, lost 60 per cent, in killed and wounded of the men engaged. With a desperate bravery worthy of the cause, they drove back the Confederate forces and enabled General Meade to unite the left of Sickles' 3rd Corps with the right of the 5th Army Corps, and thus presented a shorter but a firmer front with which to withstand the onslaught of Lee's army upon the third day.

Without invidious comparison and in no way detracting from the courage and glory of the other branches of the service who united to resist Pickett's charge, it is well known that much of the effective resistance was by the artillery. The batteries of the regulars and volunteers under General Hunt made the resistance to that awful charge that gave the victory to the Union forces. The soul of Cushing, in charge of Battery F, 4th Artillery, went up with the smoke of the last shots which sent Pickett's men reeling back from the point now marked as the high tide of the Confederacy.

Time does not permit me to mention the names of the heroes of the regular army whose blood stained this historic field, and whose sacrifices made the Union victory possible. With my intimate knowledge of the regular army, their high standard of duty, their efficiency as soldiers, their high character as men, I have seized this opportunity to come here to testify to the pride which the Nation should have in its regular army, and to dedicate this monument to the predecessors of the present regular army, on a field in which they won undying glory and perpetual gratitude from the Nation which they served. They had not the local associations, they had not the friends and neighbors of the volunteer forces to see to it that their deeds of valor were properly recorded and the value of their services suitably noted in the official records by legislation and congressional action, and they have now to depend upon the truth of history and in the cold, calm retrospect of the war as it was, to secure from Congress this suitable memorial of the work in the saving of the country which they wrought here.

All honor to the Regular Army of the United States! Never in its history has it had a stain upon its escutcheon. With no one to blow its trumpets, with no local feeling or pride to bring forth its merits, quietly and as befits a force organized to maintain civil institutions and subject always to the civil control, it has gone on doing the duty which was its to do, accepting without a murmur the dangers of war, whether upon the trackless stretches of our western frontier, exposed to the arrows and the bullets of the Indian, or in the jungles and the rice paddies of the Philippines, on the hills and in the valleys about Santiago in Cuba, or in the tremendous campaigns of the Civil War itself, and it has never failed to make a record of duty done that should satisfy the most exacting lover of his country.

It now becomes my pleasant duty to dedicate this monument to the memory of the regular soldiers of the Republic who gave up their lives at Gettysburg and who contributed in a large degree to the victory of those three fateful days in the country's history.

The National Negro Conference, which would become the NAACP, held its first meeting in New York City.

The unemployed paraded in New York.

Benny Goodman was born in Chicago.  He was nine of twelve children born to his immigrant parents, and grew up in poverty.

Columbia and the Hawaiian Chinese American baseball team played a game.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, May 30, 1909. Work Horse Parade on Day of Rest.