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Editor:
I marvel at how expeditiously our postal department moves the hundreds of million pieces of mail and packages during the Christmas season.
When I was a boy growing up in East Palestine, I remember the mailman delivering my official Gene Autry sheriff's badge, which I had sent for along with a Kellogg's Cornflakes box top and 25 cents. As I recall, in those days the mail was delivered twice a day.
When my father bought out a couple underground coal mines in Pike County, Ky., we settled in a remote hollow called Harmon's Branch. An elderly man named Ira delivered the mail there on a huge brown mule he called Troy. Dad always gave Ira a glass of buttermilk and Troy a big chew of Mail Pouch tobacco. Troy's front legs were wrapped in burlap from his hooves to his knees to guard against rattlesnake bites. He was once a mine mule and the postal department had purchased him for $40.
Ira gave me a little education on mules. "A mule is more sure footed than a horse," he explained, "and a mule won't make a pig of himself and eat too much like a horse will. And if there's a hidden ditch in a field a mule will sense it, but a horse won't and he'll step right in it and break his leg."
He said that one time some kids were throwing stones at Troy and he dismounted and warned them, "Boys, that mule is the property of the United States Government and you boys can go to jail for fooling with him."
While we were vacationing in Bar Harbor, Maine, dad and I met a salty old sea captain who delivered the mail by boat to three remote islands. He bragged that he had three lobster traps set out and pulled them each day on his return trip. "(Heck), I ain't paid for a lobster dinner in 30 years," he laughed.
In Attu, the most remote settlement of the Aleutian Islands, the mail arrives there weekly by sea plane. In the outback areas of Alaska's mainland, it is carried by dog sled. A 46 cent stamp will carry a letter to a far reaching pineapple plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii.
When the Greek traveler and historian, Herodotus, visited Persia 400 years before Christ, he marveled at how rapidly the mail moved 24 hours a day in all kinds of weather and terrain across the thousand-mile breadth of that empire.
What he recorded in his diary about those amazing horsemen who carried the mail was so appropriately adopted as the motto of our own great postal department. "Neither snow, rain, heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
Lloyd Berresford
Hanoverton