Mail your kids

[Renew Deal]

At least you could in the early 1900's...

Postal officials were surprised by a number of strange things people tried to mail through parcel post. Certainly none was more surprising than the use of the service to “mail” people. Or, to be specific, children. Some may be familiar with the story of May Pierstorff, the little five-year-old girl who was “mailed” between two towns in Idaho in 1914. Just short of what was then the limit, 50 pounds, May cost 53-cents to send from her parents in Grangeville to her grandparents in Lewiston, Idaho for a visit. May traveled the short distance with a Railway Post Office clerk in the mail train car. Her story is told in a children’s book titled, “Mailing May.”

Amazingly enough May was not the only child mailed by parcel post in the U.S., nor was she even the first! The honor of first seems to belong to a tiny 10 ¾ pound boy in Batavia, Ohio. The unnamed baby was “mailed” just a few weeks after the service began. The unnamed boy was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Beauge of Glen Este, Ohio. Grandparents seem to have played pivotal roles in parcel post child transport. The baby boy was carried by Rural Free Delivery carrier Vernon Little to its grandmother, Mrs. Louis Beague about a mile away. The boy’s parents paid 15-cents for the stamps and insured their son for $50. A few days later a small girl was “mailed” in Pennsylvania. Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Savis of Pine Hollow, entrusted their daughter to rural carrier James Byerly out of Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, who delivered her safely that afternoon to relatives in Clay Hollow. The daughter cost her parents 45-cents to send.

In spite of that busy start, the rest of the year passed without postal officials having to face other children traveling by mail. May’s travels in early 1914, along with an 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.(2) (3)

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.
<snip>

http://www.npm.si.edu/parcelpost100/p4.html

[NYC_SKP]

1. My mom threatened to send me back to Winnemucca more than once!

And I think I took the threat seriously!

[MADem]

2. The Smithsonian always has a fun twist on history... nt

[gerogie2]

3. I guess my mother wasn't kidding...

When she told me she would mail me to tin buck too 50 years ago.