'Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night'

I travel to the Post Office mostly every day as I rent a box there. I am always greeted by wonderfully kind and courteous employees. If you are a “regular”, you are welcomed and called by name. Until 1958 all Tehachapi residents had to call for their mail. No door to door mail delivery in the small town. It was a place to meet one’s neighbors and the town’s businessmen would greet one another and usually end up having coffee at a local restaurant. My husband and I happened to be visiting my parents on Tehachapi’s first day of home mail delivery in 1958. The first few weeks of door to door delivery found mail carriers looking for house numbers that were not on houses, or never had been. Many street signs on the north side of the tracks were not in place and carriers relied on “home town” memories to get the mail to the addressee. Word had been sent out ahead telling residents to affix numbers to their homes, but that didn’t always work. Alice Hemphill, Post Mistress at that time, reported that every piece of mail was delivered on that historical day.

I recall living on a farm in Old Town and our address was Star Route. No box number, just Star Route. Maybe the folk in town didn’t have mail delivered to their home but the country folk did. The carrier knew we lived there. It was fun to go to the mailbox and retrieve the mail. If my mother wanted to mail a letter, we would put the little red flag up and the carrier would know to stop even if we did not have mail. If Mom did not have a stamp; no problem. She would put the money in the box, (three cents) and the mail person would take care of it.

When we moved to town, our box number was #945 and later on #634. Even after the door to door delivery started, many folk preferred calling for their mail at the Post Office, including my parents. Habit, I guess.

When my husband was in Korea in 1952 I used to send him Air Mail letters. I think the postage was six cents but regular first class mail was still three cents, not to be raised to four cents until 1958. My husband, being in the military in a war zone was allowed to just write, “Free” on the envelope where the stamp belonged. In all of his trips to far lands he used “Free” postage. Those in the Armed Forces still do, I believe. Maybe they just do computers and other magical modern instruments now.

I liked it when the price of stamps was raised to a number that made figuring the amount needed for stamps by easy multiplication in the head. Five cents (1964), ten cents (1974), twenty-five cents (1988)made calculating one’s needs in stamps easy. But, say, thirteen cents in 1975, or twenty-nine cents in 1991; that took a pencil and paper to get the correct answer unless you bought ten or a hundred. I remember my mother sending Christmas cards with the flap not sealed but just tucked in, for “ a cent and a half”. That takes a little fancy multiplication. It’s still one of the bargains in our lives. Not only that, one can depend on the mail arriving once it’s slipped into the mail box.

My husband depended on me to write the checks to pay the bills. Since he was gone a good bit of the time, it was not a bad idea. He made the money and I spent it on hum drum things like groceries, utilities, kids shoes, etc. One time I sent my husband on an errand to the post office with a letter and told him to just buy a stamp as I didn’t have any. He came home laughing and told me he had asked for a “three cent stamp!” The clerk laughed and said, “My, it’s been a long while since you’ve been to the Post Office hasn’t it?” That was in 1968 and a stamp was six cents that year. He did his job and I did mine. It worked out.

At any rate, I have always associated with the Postal Service, the Motto: “ Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Come to find out, the Post Office Service never really adopted the term. It just kind of found itself being represented by the public.

Looking farther I find it came from a book about the Persian/Greek War by Herodotus (500- 449 B.C.) Well, if the mail bag fits, wear it! Ain’t that the berries?