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THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Wednesday at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting. (Please check out previous columns while you're at it.) All support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

          [Every so often, especially when there is a short work week like this one – as well as being under the weather -- I get a hankering to revise and re-run one of the older columns – even better if it is an unusual one. The following from March 2021 immediately came to mind.]

“To write is human, to get mail: Devine!”
Susan Lendroth

          Collateral damage of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the fortunes of the U.S. Postal Service. Whether justified or not, it already did not have a great reputation when 2020 began. It always seemed to be running at a deficit, the competition with FedEx and other delivery services was intensifying, and many workers appeared to view their jobs as drudgery. When the pandemic took hold, service slowed to a crawl and for customers it was like waiting on a Depression-era bread line to try to mail a package. Post offices in rural communities were hit especially hard with some services simply shutting down.

          A century ago, things were different. The U.S. Postal Service was viewed as completely reliable, and the mail carrier, especially in rural communities, was welcomed as a friend and sometimes a lifeline to the outside world. In fact, some people viewed the U.S. Mail so highly they trusted their children to it. Yes, at one time parents mailed their kids.

          According to History.com, in January 1913, one Ohio couple named the Beagues took advantage of the U.S. Postal Service’s new parcel program to make a very special delivery. They paid 15 cents for stamps and an unknown amount to insure their infant son for $50, then handed him over to the mailman, who dropped the boy off at his grandmother’s house about a mile away.

In the next few years, stories about children being mailed through rural routes would crop up from time to time as people pushed the limits of what could be sent through Parcel Post. In one famous case, on February 19, 1914, a four-year-old girl named Charlotte May Pierstorff was mailed via train from her home in Grangeville, Idaho, to her grandparents’ house about 73 miles away. Her story has become so legendary that it was even made into a children’s book, Mailing May.

At that time, regulations about what you could and could not send through the mail were vague for shipping parcels over four pounds. People immediately started testing its limits by mailing eggs, bricks, snakes, and other unusual items – and children, because technically, there was no postal regulation against doing so.

Nancy Pope, the head curator of history at the National Postal Museum, was quoted in Smithsonian magazine that she has found about seven instances of people mailing children between 1913 and 1915, beginning with the baby in Ohio.

“It wasn’t common to mail your children, yet for long distances, it would’ve been cheaper to buy the stamps to send a kid by what was then ‘Railway Mail’ than to buy her a ticket on a passenger train,” Pope said. “And remember, with mail carriers, people who shipped their children were not handing them over to a stranger.”

But there were some limitations, such as a mailman might have carried a swaddled child who couldn’t walk but he wouldn’t have let a diaper-wearing baby sit in a pile of people’s mail.

In the case of May Pierstorff, whose parents sent her to her grandparents’ house, the postal worker who took her by Railway Mail train was a relative. The Idaho family paid 53 cents for the stamps that they put on their daughter’s coat. After Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson heard about this incident—as well as another inquiry someone had made that month about mailing children—he officially banned postal workers from accepting humans as mail. Defiantly, a year later a woman mailed her six-year-old daughter from her home in Florida to her father’s home in Virginia. At 720 miles, it was longest known postal trip of any of the child and cost only 15 cents in stamps.

In August 1915, three-year-old Maud Smith made what appears to be the last journey of a child by U.S. Mail, when her grandparents shipped her 40 miles through Kentucky to visit her sick mother. After the story made the news, Superintendent John Clark of the Cincinnati division of the Railway Mail Service investigated, questioning why the postmaster in Caney, Kentucky, had allowed a child on a mail train when that was explicitly against regulations.

Though Maud seems to be the last successfully mailed child, others tried. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, in June 1920, First Assistant Postmaster General John C. Koons rejected two applications to mail children, noting that they couldn’t be classified as “harmless live animals.” According to the regulations then, the only animals that were allowed in the mail were bees and bugs. Chickens were not permitted until 1918.

Thankfully, given how difficult it has been for many parents to be quarantined with young children and as much as the U.S. Postal Service has needed business to stem crushing losses, reportedly no one has stepped up to a window to inquire about mailing Junior to grandma, or anywhere. Yet.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, including The Last Outlaws, which was published in December, and (with Bob Drury) Throne of Grace, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press in May. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.