February 19 - They Mailed Their Kid!!!

nPosted on February 19, 2019

Key Points

nCharlotte May Pierstorff has a Wikipedia article that none of us would want:
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nHer parents mailed her to her grandparents – by parcel post!!
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nYou know how some new services become instant hits? Well, when the U.S. Postal Service introduced Parcel Post Service on the first day of 1913, it became immediately popular. Soon the collect-on-delivery service was added, and the maximum weight rose up to 50 pounds (22.6 kg).
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nBox manufacturers became WAY busier and richer. It wasn’t long before they had invented a variety of new sorts of packaging, designing specialty containers for everything from eggs to baked goods.
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n(That first year of Parcel Post Service, just after midnight, six eggs were mailed from St. Louis, MI, to a town in Illinois. By 7:00 p.m. the same day, the eggs came back to St. Louis – but in the form of a freshly baked cake!!)

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nA few people misused the Parcel Post – or, rather, used the service in ways that were never intended. And so a few laws and limitations had to be created so that these sorts of abuses never happened again. Here are two examples:
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nHe mailed a building!
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nA man named W. H. Coltharp was supposed to build a bank in a town in Utah, and he discovered that the Parcel Post was a way less expensive way of getting bricks from a company more than 125 miles away than was shipping them by wagon. So he had the bricks shipped in 50-pound packages (that was the weight limit) – but LOTS of packages! He had the brick company ship 40 packages at a time (2,000 pounds – or a ton), and of course this overwhelmed the Parcel Post Service.
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See also May 1 – Martin Z. Mollusk Day

This is the bank that was built from the bricks
sent through Parcel Post.

nSo a limit was written into the law; no more than 200 pounds of total weight would be allowed per day between any two parties.
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nSomeone at the U.S. Postal Service stated that it wasn’t their intent that buildings be shipped through the mail!
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nThey mailed their kid!
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nAnd at last we come to little Charlotte May, age 4 or 5.
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nHer parents lived in one town in Idaho, and her grandparents lived in another Idaho town about 70 miles away. Apparently the parents wanted to send their little girl to her grandparents for a visit, but the train ticket was awfully expensive.
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nThen they realized that there were no rules against sending her via Parcel Post!
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nShe even weighed just under the 50 pound limit, so….
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nNow, I was horrified, because I was picturing them putting their child into a box with air holes! The truth is a ton less terrible: the parents pinned 53 cents worth of postage stamps onto her coat and dropped her off with a postal worker in their town; she traveled on the train in the mail compartment, but her mother’s cousin worked for the railway mail service and was with her; and she was delivered to her grandparents’ house by a postal clerk from that town.
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nThere were a few other cases of children mailed in the U.S., apparently, but soon there was a new law: no humans can be sent by Parcel Post or any U.S. Postal Service!!
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