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If you didn’t already hear, Saturday was Thank A Mailman Day. While we missed the holiday itself, the fact is that mail carriers rarely get the respect and appreciation they deserve, which is why we’ve decided to go ahead and “deliver” you these fascinating facts about the USPS with the hope that you’ll find time in the upcoming week to say “thank you” to your mail carrier.
America got its first postal service in 1692 when King William gave Thomas Neale the power to erect “offices for the receiving and dispatching letters and pacquets,” essentially making him the US’s first Postmaster General.
The post office is so well-established in the states that the Constitution specifically grants congress the right “to establish post offices and post roads. In fact, Benjamin Franklin helped create the United States Post Office and served as the first Postmaster General.
After 1792 and up until the post office was divided from the government in 1971, the Postmaster General was a position on the Presidential cabinet and the person in the role served as the last person in the presidential line of succession –meaning that if the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Attorney General and every other cabinet member died in some sort of freakish accident, the leader of the post office would suddenly be in charge of the nation. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m certainly glad it never came to that.
The first adhesive stamps were issued in 1842 and postage rates became standardized in 1845. Congress officially authorized postage stamps in 1847 and the first two general issue stamps featured Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. The two men were the only images seen on stamps until 1856, when a Thomas Jefferson stamp was issued. Throughout this time, other payment methods were still accepted but in 1856, postage stamps became mandatory for mail sent through the Post Office.
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As the death march of the United States Postal Service continues, Evan Kalish of Going Postal blog is doing his best to visit and document the post offices that are slated to be closed. So far, he's visited 2,745 post offices in 43 states.
This one above is in Junedale, Pennsylvania, and sadly it has a common tale:
The town is just south of Hazleton, which itself is near the intersection of Interstates 80 and 81 in northeast PA. This was a meaningful visit for me; there was a local resident in the office who detailed to me the story of the beautiful landscaping in front of the post office.
Three years ago this post office looked very different. A local Boy Scout earned his Eagle Award for providing community service. What did he do? He fixed up the front of the post office and made it beautiful.
First up: You see the trees and roses out front? This Eagle Scout planted them. The rock gardens? Also his work. If you look closely, you can see a bench right below the sign between the trees. Guess who built it! Yep, he did. He donated the new Junedale Post Office sign as well. Isn't it fantastic?
By my understanding, the final item was to extend the flag pole. Literally, he made it taller. Why? The Postmaster told me that it's because the flag used to drag on the roof of the post office. Now it waves without interference. (It wasn't windy when I arrived there, so we couldn't really see it in action; but we can see how it clears the roof, right?)
This is one anecdote that demonstrates the social importance of the post office to small communities such as Junedale across the country. Even though it's the only business in town, residents sure take pride in it. Outside the post office, when I was taking these photos, I told a resident "I hope you can keep this office open." Her response: "We do, too."
Rural communities across America are experiencing the indignity of being exposed to boilerplate 'public meetings' wherein they're basically informed that the decision has been made to close their post office. According to a resident I asked outside this post office, the public meeting felt canned and the residents felt the decision had already been made to close their office. This story was repeated to me in small towns all across Pennsylvania this weekend. Every single time I asked, I got back the exact same response.
Closing a local post office, especially in rural towns, can have repercussions far beyond just having to drive a bit further to another facility to send your mail - these post offices are often the heart of the community, sort of a de facto town center where people connect with each other.
The sad part? Even closing all of the local post offices aren't going to come close to solving the financial woes of the USPS. Josh Sanburn of TIME Magazine explains:
"Closing post offices has almost nothing to do with the financial problem that the postal service finds itself in today," says Hutkins, founder of savethepostoffice.com. "Virtually nothing. The cost of operating these post offices and the amount of money that will be saved by closing them is minuscule in the context of the budget of the postal service and the deficit that it's running." [...]
By the USPS's calculations, closing all the 3,650 post offices up for review would save just $200 million, or 2% of the deficit of about $10 billion. But it would also eliminate thousands of jobs. "This is a problem I really struggle with because it seems so irrational," Hutkins says.
Links: Going Postal blog and How the U.S. Postal Service Fell Apart over at TIME
Previously on Neatorama: USPS Rescue Plan: More Junk Mail! | US Postal Service: Is Collapse Imminent?
(Image credit: Flicker user “The Wanderer’s Eye”)
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, AIR staff
Which came first — the chicken or the egg?
The question has a reputation for being difficult, perhaps even impossible, to answer. Philosophers treat it as a conundrum. But in the hands of an experimental scientist, the question is simple and straightforward, and the answer is easily obtained.
I doubt that I am the first to solve the chicken-and-egg problem, but a search of the scientific literature turned up surprisingly few accounts — none, in fact — of previous work. Here, then, is an account of my work on what turns out to be a trivial question.
Figure 2. The 2003 USPS regulations for mailing chickens.
Which came first — the chicken of the egg? I tackled the question experimentally, using a chicken, an egg, and the United States Postal Service (USPS).
I mailed the chicken and the egg, each in its own separate packaging, and kept careful track of when each shipment was sent from a post office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when it subsequently arrived at its intended destination in New York City.
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I love the idea of this project by web designer Matthew McVickar. He sent this camera in the mail with a message asking the postal workers to take pictures on the camera’s trip to its destination. The result is fun and educational, and it would be a great school project for any teachers out there.
Link Via Laughing Squid
For the past three years, Phillip Herr of the US Government Accountability Office was tasked by Congress to find out what’s wrong with the US Postal Service.
He came to this conclusion (unsurprising to some, I’m sure):
Herr and his team concluded that the postal service’s business model was so badly broken that collapse was imminent. Abandoning a long tradition of overdue reports, they felt they had to deliver theirs 18 months early in April 2010 to the various House and Senate committees and subcommittees that watch over the USPS. A year later, the situation is even grimmer. With the rise of e-mail and the decline of letters, mail volume is falling at a staggering rate, and the postal service’s survival plan isn’t reassuring. Elsewhere in the world, postal services are grappling with the same dilemma—only most of them, in humbling contrast, are thriving. [...]
The problems of the USPS are just as big. It relies on first-class mail to fund most of its operations, but first-class mail volume is steadily declining—in 2005 it fell below junk mail for the first time. This was a significant milestone. The USPS needs three pieces of junk mail to replace the profit of a vanished stamp-bearing letter.
Follow these five surefire steps and you’ll be stuck to the corner of envelopes in no time!
Step #1: KICK THE BUCKET
This is the hard part. According to the U.S. Postal Service, no living person can appear on an official stamp. No exceptions! (Clearly, the Postal Service is in the Elvis-is-dead camp).
Step #2: BE PATIENT
Don’t expect your stamps to arrive in time for your wake. The Postal Service has a rule that people can’t be honored in stamp form until five years after their death. But they do make an exception for recently deceased U.S. presidents. The USPS is willing to honor a former commander-in-chief on the first anniversary of the birthday following his death.
Step #3: CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY!
Even after you’ve been dead and buried for five years, the USPS will only issue stamps on significant anniversaries. For most personalities, that means waiting until what would have been their 100th birthday before landing the honor. Of course, what constitutes a “significant” anniversary is up for grabs. In 1993, the USPS issued an Elvis Presley stamp on what would have been the King’s 58th birthday. No one complained; more than 500 million Elvis Presley stamps were sold.
Step #4: DON’T BECOME A RABBI
Because of the whole separation-of-church-and-state thing, the USPS won’t issue stamps that commemorate “individuals whose principle achievements are associated with religious undertakings.” But the government bends this rule from time to time. When the Postal Service announced its slate of commemorative stamps for 2010, one of them featured Mother Teresa. Atheist groups blasted the stamp for its religious underpinnings, but the USPS responded that the stamp was intended to honor the nun’s humanitarian work more than her religious beliefs. Despite the controversy, the Mother Teresa stamp was officially released on September 5, 2010 -when she would have been 100 years old.
Step #5: DON’T SUCK UP TO THE COMMITTEE
Since 1957, the Postmaster General has appointed and maintained the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which consists of 15 leaders from diverse fields. They meet four times a year to discuss stamp proposals, and the committee’s roster often reads like a random assemblage of folks you’d never see at the same dinner party. Past members include Academy Award winner Karl Malden, author James Michener, and Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps (who served not one, but two terms on the committee, from 1983 to 2006). Phelps wrote extensively about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the group in his 2007 memoir, Undertaker’s Son: Life Lessons from a Coach. During his tenure, the committee received a deluge of 50,000 proposals a year and often felt pressure from members of Congress to approve certain stamps. Phelps wrote, “The pressure doesn’t work; if anything it turns off the committee.”
Current members of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Board include Jean Picker Firstenberg, former head of the American Film Institute; Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale; and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who ended up having a “beer summit” at the White House in 2009. If you wind up having a drink with Gates, don’t bring up the stamp thing.
International Diplomacy & the Postal Service
Believe it or not, the U.S. Postal Service has been issuing commemorative stamps since 1893. (The first series celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World!) But the real reasons the USPS issues these stamps isn’t so much to celebrate patriotism; it’s to make money. When people collect stamps instead of using them for postage, the federal government turns a healthy profit. In 2006, the USPS estimated that 120 million Elvis stamps were never mailed, delivering more than $30 million to the Postal System’s coffers.
But not every commemorative stamp is a good idea. In 1994, the Postal Service planned to issue a stamp recognizing the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government was trying to portray the historical event without offering a judgement on the bombing itself, but lots of people questioned its tastefulness. Japan’s foreign minister protested, as did the mayor of Nagasaki, who called the stamp “heartless.” The Japanese embassy in Washington took its case to the State Department in hopes of canceling the stamp before it was released. Eventually, protests grew so loud that the Clinton White House leaned on the USPS to ditch the stamp, and the Postal Service caved. But it held onto the theme. In 1995, the USPS replaced the mushroom cloud stamp with one depicting Harry Truman announcing the end of the war.
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The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader.
From the “Dustbin of History” files, here’s the pungent tale of two midwest states whose pride and honor were once challenged…by a slab of stinky cheese.
IT AIN’T EASY BEING CHEESY
It began in the winter of 1935 when a doctor in Independence, Iowa, prescribed an odd medicine to an ailing farm wife: Limburger cheese. The doctor figured the heavily aromatic cheese would help clear the woman’s clogged sinuses. (If you don’t know what Limburger smells like, give it a whiff the next time you’re at the supermarket.) So the order was put through to Monroe, Wisconsin, to send some Limburger cheese-post haste.
Why Monroe? Swiss cheesemakers first arrived there in 1845. At the time, Wisconsin was in the depths of an economic depression and cheese helped pull them out of it.By 1910, Wisconsin had become the cheese-making capital of the United States, producing more cheese than any other state. And Monroe was the Limburger capital of Wisconsin.
THE BATTLE LINES ARE DRAWN
Monroe’s postmaster, John Burkhard, approved the delivery and sent it on its way. But the mail carrier in Independence, Iowa, who delivered the Limburger was so offended by the stench wafting through his roadster that he refused to deliver it. Citing a postal rule that said mail would only be delivered if it “did not smell objectionable,” Independence’s postmaster, Warren Miller, concurred without examining or even smelling the cheese. He had it sent back to Monroe on the grounds that it could “fell an ox twenty paces.”
Burkhard took it personally; to insult Limburger is to insult not just Monroe, but all of Wisconsin and its proud cheese heritage. So Burkhard rewrapped the package and sent it back to Iowa. Miller promptly returned it to Wisconsin. War was brewing.
THE BATTLE OF DUBUQUE
Burkhard took his gripe all the way to the United States Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. At first, he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. So Burkhard sent him some Limburger. The Postmaster general then decided that, yes, the cheese smelled bad, but no, it wasn’t hazardous. And the war was over, right? Wrong.
By this time the press had sniffed out the story. At a time when the nation was mired in the Great Depression and Hitler was rising to power in Germany, a story about smelly cheese was a breath of fresh air. And unwilling to give in, postmaster Burkhard challenged postmaster Miller to a “cheese-smelling duel”-if Miller could sit at a table and not wretch from the stench of freshly-cut Limburger, then he would never again raise a stink about Wisconsin and its cheese. Miller accepted. Dozens of people from each town-as well as a throng of reporters-showed up at the Julien Hotel in Dubuque, Iowa, on the cold afternoon of March 8, 1935, to witness the standoff.
A Duel to the Breath
The two sat across from each other at a table. While flashbulbs flickered and onlookers whispered, Burkhard placed a box on the table, unwrapped it, and produced a very strong sample of his state’s pride and joy, praising not only its medicinal qualities, but boasting that nothing on Earth tasted better with beer. The tension was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. Famed Milwaukee Journal reporter Richard S. Davis sent out a dispatch, calling it a “duel to the breath.”
As Burkhard prepared to push the slab of cheese over to Miller, he offered Miller a clothespin and a gas mask. But Miller just shook his head and meekly surrendered. “I won’t need that clothespin,” he lamented, “I haven’t any sense of smell.”
The crowd gasped. The battle was over before it began. Burkhard was immediately declared the winner, and Miller had to agree to allow any and all Wisconsin cheese safe passage through Iowa’s postal routes. The next day newspapers in 30 states ran a picture of the olfactorily-challenged Miller looking bewildered next to a piece of steaming Limburger. And now the war was over, right? Wrong. The final battle was yet to come.
THE BATTLE OF BEAVER DAM
While Burkhard was basking in victory, something he’d said about Limburger at that table in Dubuque-that nothing tasted better with beer-was churning through Miller’s head. Every good Iowan knew that the best food to eat with beer was smoked whitefish, not some stinky piece of cheese. Miller just couldn’t let it go. So he challenged Burkhard with another contest: a fight for the title of “Best Snack in the World.” Once again the press got whiff of the food feud, and they convened at the neutral site chosen for the contest: the American Legion Hall in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.
This confrontation was even more serious than the first-now there were judges. And with so much at stake, both sides used underhanded tactics; they bribed the judges with beer. The fish-heads bought a round, then the cheese-heads. And once all palates were properly whetted, the showdown began.
Carnage
First came the sliced Limburger with beer. Then the Iowans gave the judges smoked whitefish…and more beer. The battle raged on: Limburger and beer, whitefish and beer. Limburger and beer, whitefish and beer. Finally, when the judges could eat or drink no more, they sent the least-inebriated member of their panel to the podium: “The judgeth have reached a dethision. It was unamus… unans… they all said the same darn thing! Cheese’n beer s’wunnerful. Fishes’n beer s’wunnerful, too. But when you have Limburger cheese and smoked whitefish and beer, heck, it don’t get no better than that!”
Both sides were declared victorious, Burkhard and Miller retained their respective states’ honor, and Limburger cheese had risen from being referred to as “hazardous material” to holding the co-title of “Best Snack in the World.”
VICTORY PARADE
That October, Monroe, Wisconsin, held its annual Cheese Day parade. All the press coverage from the Limburger cheese war made it the biggest Cheese Day ever. Fifty thousand people showed up to bask in the glory-including the farmer’s wife (who had healed quite nicely). Warren Miller came all the way from Iowa and was given a place of honor in the parade-right next to his friend John Burkhard.
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader, a fantastic book by the Bathroom Readers’ Institute.
The 17th book in this the Bathroom Reader series is filled to the brim with facts, fun, and fascination, including articles about the Origin of Kung Fu, How to Kill a Zombie, Women in Space and more!
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
The United States Postal Service offers substantial shipping discounts for materials sent at Media Mail rates. The predictable result, especially during an economic downturn, is that retailers and the general public often try to send non-media items in packages at Media Mail rates. In the current issue of American Philatelist, Wayne Youngblood, a Director-at-Large of the American Philatelic Society, reports that the USPS is cracking down on these abuses:
Media Mail as a class is not closed against inspection. Thus, our local post office and (in theory) a few others have been opening virtually all incoming and outgoing Media Mail for the past year (since July 1, 2009). Larger post offices are supposed to do spot checks. The explanation is that this enforcement program may eventually go national.
When non-qualifying material is found inside the package, the recipient is charged postage due for the difference from standard Parcel Post delivery (at this point, no additional penalties are being applied). That difference may easily double or triple the cost of shipping.
The biggest problem for users of Media Mail is that the definition of qualifying items is somewhat vague. “Advertising” is prohibited in material shipped at Media Mail rates, but advertisements are often incidental components of items that would otherwise be considered media.
The article notes that during these inspections, the USPS is also looking for evidence of inappropriate use or reuse of Priority Mail and Express Mail shipping boxes.
Link (pdf).
Every year, the United States Postal Service release a set of new stamps and this year, one particular set stands out: The Sunday Funnies Collection.
Comics Alliance blog has the scoop (and more pics):
Based on popular newspaper comic strips, the series will include stamps involving Archie, Garfield, Dennis the Menace, the cast of "Beetle Bailey," and my personal favorites, Calvin and Hobbes!
Link | USPS News Release – Thanks Laura!
For many people, even the word “Detroit” brings to mind images of crime, cars and poverty. But no city can really be that black and white. The things you don’t know about Detroit might just entertain you. Elovethiscity has a fun collection of 10 Detroit Facts You Should Know. For example, did you know the city hosts the only floating post office in America (shown above):
The J. W. Westcott II docks just South of The Ambassador Bridge along the western shore of the Detroit River. She is America’s only floating ZIP Code [48222]. Delivering over 100 years of “mail-by-the-pail”, the J.W. Westcott Company was originally formed in 1874 by Captain J.W. Westcott to inform passing vessels of changes in orders.
Today the 45-foot vessel’s duties include U.S. mail delivery; freight delivery, storage, forwarding; message service; passenger service to and from vessels and pilot boat services for the Port of Detroit. The Westcott also sells nautical charts, postcards, books, and has been known to deliver the occasional mid-river pizza.
