OK, we got lots of great comments yesterday. Nothing like talking a little trash about the Post Office to get people wound up and posting comments. I enjoyed reading your stories. Today’s picture is from about 1915, and shows Postmen on motorized scooters. At first, I thought they must be electric scooters, but on further examination, I don’t see anything large enough to be a battery, so I have decided they are probably small gas engines. Batteries were pretty inefficient at that time, and the battery would have needed to be! pretty big.

Since everyone was telling their post office stories yesterday, I thought I would throw one in. As I have mentioned before, we home schooled our daughter k-12. When she was in 1st and 2nd grade we had a lot of fun. Her home school group would go on lots of field trips. The kids LOVED the field trips and got to go see lots of neat things. They went to places like the fire station, the police station, the hospital, the TV station and the National Guard armory. In all cases, the people were extra nice, and really showed the kids the inside workings of wherever they visited. So, they would get to sit inside the news helicopter, operate a camera, or turn the siren on on a fire truck. These field trips were always the high point of the kids week, and people really were nice to show the kids neat things. Well, there was one field trip that did not go well. Her group took a tour of the post office. The person giving the tour was very nice. She took ! the kids back into the post office, showed them where the mail came in, showed them where the mail was sorted, and then showed them how it was delivered. So, the person was nice enough. However, when the kids got back home, all of them started crying, and started having nightmares about the post office. I found that interesting, because you would think that all the other things that they had seen at the other places could have been much more disturbing than the post office . . . I had thought the post office would be about as benign as you could get. Well, I guess when they were in the post office, the lady showed them the warehouse sized room where they sorted the mail. She showed that the upper part of the large room had two way mirrors, and told them that behind the mirrors were people who watched the workers to make sure they did not steal anything, and made sure they kept working the whole time. Then she talked about how the mail just kept coming and coming and coming,! and they had to get it moved through before even more mail ca! me. As a n adult I did not think much about it, but all the kids came away very disturbed. Again, it was not just my daughter, but it was all the kids that went on the tour. I then started to remember all the stories about shootings at the post office, and other problems that had occurred. Perhaps there is a really bad social environment inside the post office, and the kids picked up on it.



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