I always figured the Postal Service was the most boring institution in America. Stamps, junk mail, that one truck that ignores your package until you leave the house. Then I fell down a research rabbit hole, and it turns out the USPS has a history that reads like a Wes Anderson movie: mailed toddlers, missile mail, a taxidermied dog with his own exhibit, and a boat with its own ZIP code. Here are five true things about the Post Office that genuinely rearranged my brain.
Did you know people used to mail their children through the Post Office?
When Parcel Post launched in 1913, the rules said you could ship anything under a certain weight, and a few rural families read that very literally. The most famous case came in February 1914, when four-year-old May Pierstorff was “mailed” from Grangeville, Idaho, to her grandparents about 73 miles away. Her parents attached 53 cents in stamps to her coat, and she rode the whole way in the train’s mail compartment, chaperoned by a mail clerk who happened to be a relative. She wasn’t the only one, either. Several children were shipped this way, usually because parcel rates were cheaper than a train ticket. The Postmaster General eventually issued regulations banning the mailing of human beings, which remains one of the few rules an agency ever had to write because customers kept sticking stamps on their kids.
Did you know the Navy once delivered mail by cruise missile?
On June 8, 1959, the submarine USS Barbero surfaced off the Atlantic coast and fired a Regulus cruise missile at Florida. Inside the nose cone, where a nuclear warhead would normally sit, were two Post Office mail containers holding about 3,000 letters. Twenty-two minutes later the missile touched down at Naval Station Mayport, the mail was retrieved, postmarked, and sent on its way. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was so thrilled he declared that before man reaches the moon, “mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles.” That prediction aged like milk. Missile mail was never attempted again, partly because each launch cost a fortune and partly because the Defense Department was less interested in delivering your birthday card than in reminding the Soviets what a Regulus could do.
Did you know one Arizona town still gets its mail by mule train?
The village of Supai, Arizona, sits at the bottom of a side canyon of the Grand Canyon, eight miles from the nearest road. No truck can reach it, so the mail arrives the same way it has for over a century: by mule. Five days a week, a pack train picks its way down the switchbacks carrying letters, packages, and, crucially, most of the town’s food and supplies, since Amazon does not descend 2,000 vertical feet of canyon trail. Each mule can haul around 130 pounds, and the mail gets a special postmark noting its mule-train journey, which stamp collectors love. It is the last mule-delivered mail route in the United States, and it means somewhere out there, a Prime package has ridden into the Grand Canyon strapped to an animal with better job security than most of us.
Did you know there’s a boat with its own ZIP code?
The J.W. Westcott II is a 45-foot boat that delivers mail to freighters on the Detroit River while both vessels are moving. Sailors on the Great Lakes can spend weeks aboard ship, so the Westcott motors alongside these thousand-foot monsters, and the crew hauls mail up the side in a bucket on a rope, a system officially known as “mail in the pail.” The operation is so established that the boat has carried its own ZIP code, 48222, since World War II, making it the only floating ZIP code in America. Address a letter to a sailor with that code and it will be delivered mid-river, to a moving ship, by bucket. Meanwhile, my mail carrier considers my porch steps an extreme sport.
Did you know the Post Office’s first mascot was a scruffy dog who traveled 140,000 miles?
In 1888, a stray terrier mutt wandered into the Albany, New York, post office and fell asleep on a pile of mailbags. The clerks named him Owney, and he decided mailbags were his entire personality. He started following them onto mail wagons, then onto Railway Mail Service trains, riding the rails from town to town wherever the mail went. Clerks considered him a good luck charm because no train Owney rode ever wrecked, and postal workers across the country attached medals and tags to his collar to mark his visits. He collected over 1,000 of them, so many that the Postmaster General gave him a special harness-style jacket to carry the weight. In 1895 he even made a round-the-world trip by steamship and rail, logging some 140,000 lifetime miles. When he died in 1897, postal clerks raised money to have him preserved, and Owney stands in the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum to this day, still wearing his medals. In 2011 he got his own Forever stamp, which means the mail dog literally became the mail.
Send this to someone who complains about the Post Office… they’ll never look at a mail truck the same way after learning it used to be a cruise missile.
