Bet a lot of you didn’t know this:
On February 19, 1914, five-year-old May Pierstorff was “mailed” from her parents’ home in Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents’ house about 73 miles away for just 53-cents worth of stamps – much cheaper than a train ticket! May’s parents were taking advantage of parcel post service, the ability to mail packages, which began just the year before. In the early years of this service, customers and postal officials were still getting used to how the service could be used. But mailing children?
Amazingly enough May wasn’t the only child entrusted to parcel post service. But before images of babies bouncing around in mailbags start appearing in your head, the children whose families entrusted them to the Post Office Department were “mailed” by traveling with trusted postal workers (in May’s case, a relative who worked on the Railway Mail trains).
May’s travels in early 1914, along with a written inquiry about mailing children that month, inspired Postmaster General Burleson to issue directions to the nation’s postmasters that all human beings were barred from the mails. Of course for some, laws are meant to be broken. And merely a month after the “no-humans” announcement, rural carrier B.H. Knepper in Maryland carried a 14-pound baby from its grandmother’s home in Clear Spring to the mother’s house in Indian Springs, twelve miles away. A local newspaper reported that the baby slept through the entire trip.
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Kurt Kinard
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