Mail

The mailman of my childhood showed up around noon every day except Sunday. He took the letters from that the grownups clipped to the outside of the mailbox with a clothes pin. He left letters inside the box, which was just outside the front door. When the dogs yelped, we knew the mail had arrived.

Being a child, I rarely got any mail, with the exception of a postcard from a traveling classmate or letters from my cousin, Mac. We are the same age and corresponded through the challenges of childhood and the awkward teenage years. My name was always preceded by Miss and his by Master. We used our best handwriting on onion-skin paper tablets with see-thru lines. As we aged we went from pencil to fountain pens and finally to ball points.

The adults were happy when they got Air Mail letters. You could tell an Air Mail letter because it came in an envelope with a red, white and blue border. The paper and the envelope were lightweight – I guess to reduce the freight load for the airplane. Air Mail came from far-away places like California or even Germany.

The adults also go bills in the mail, but in those days there were few bills to be paid. There was a monthly mortgage payment and perhaps a car loan and an insurance bill.
There were no credit cards bills or offers, but my mother and grandmother had something that was called a “charge-a-plate.” It was I guess an addressograph plate about the size of a “dog-tag.” It had its own little leatherette sleeve. I believe that it had numbers on it that indicated which stores you could use it at, and I think for us that included all of the downtown Birmingham department stores. This, of course, resulted in bills via postal mail and my first acquaintance with “charge it.”

The mail also brought catalogs, but mostly the BIG ones from Sears and JC Penny. We looked in the catalogs and kept them for reference, but if we wanted to buy anything we went to the store.
My parents were big magazine subscribers. We always had Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, Southern Living, National Geographic and for my Dad, Fortune and US News and World Report. My mother’s favorite magazine was American Heritage. It was a hardbound magazine about American history and she devoured it every month. Like most of my classmates, I got Highlights.

In college mail was mostly letters from my mother, the occasional greeting card or postcard and my monthly bank statement. There were no bills because I had no credit cards. The mail came to a central post office on campus where each student had a mail box. In those days, mail was not a big part of my life. I didn’t like to write letters because I was too busy. Much to my mother’s chagrin. I would prefer to pick up the phone. Of course, long distance calls were more expensive than stamps, so I go some grief over my preference for the phone.

About my senior year (1968) the postal service set up a kiosk on campus where you could buy stamps and mail packages, all from a vending machine. That was a big deal!
Once I was out of college and married, we started to get more mail. There were credit cards and credit card offers. There were progressively more catalogs and junk mailings. We subscribed to more magazines. Long distance got cheaper and letters got fewer, though my mother still preferred to write a letter over making a phone call.

We move to California is 1971, and my parents were always sending us packages by mail. My parents discovered this really cool way to save money on sending packages. There was this little known company called United Parcel Service and they had this warehouse where you could take your packages and mail them. A guy in a brown truck would deliver them a few days later. What a concept! We all know, of course, the rest of that story.

The volume of mail coming into our house over the years has gotten to be so great that I had to come up with a quick and efficient system of dealing with it. For years, I have kept a trash can next to the table where the mail comes in. These days it is a wicker hamper.

Today I guess every household must have a mail handling protocol or we would all be drowning in it. I have a mail table set up in the family room. It is basically an oval shaped end table with a small drawer. On it I have a really large flat round basket from Senegal. Also on the table there is small napkin holder for my husband’s mail and, a pewter cup for pens. Next to it I have a plastic lined wicker hamper for the trash. My husband brings in the mail each day and reviews each item carefully. He takes the mail he wants, including the bills, and scurries off with it to his downstairs office, leaving me with the rest of it. I promptly throw most of what remains away. If I should happen to bring in the mail, I put his mail and the bills in his holder. I leave a stack of magazines and a few selected catalogs on the table for reading later. The rest of my mail I take upstairs and review. I keep a trash can under my desk for empty envelopes and more mail disposal. I also have a shredder under my desk for shredding those ubiquitous credit card offers.

But that is just the system for the household mail. Because I have work virtually, I also have to deal with business mail. The postal business mail comes to a mailbox at the local UPS store. Either I or one of my contractors picks it up almost daily. It goes right upstairs with me to my office and much of it also goes directly into the recycling and or is shredded. In our house we use blue for office paper recycling just in case we ever have to “go through it.” There are always payments to be processed and bills to be reviewed and approved. I have a letter tray that I use for items to be taken back downstairs and distributed to other members of my team. Some stuff I scan in and send to others via e-mail.

For years, I have been tearing the stamps off of envelopes and sending them to my friend, Ethel, in Leesburg, FL. She belongs to the Leesburg Women’s Club and they collect the used stamps to build houses through Habitat for Humanity. I am not sure how that all works, but I know it does and am glad to help.

I could talk about postage, but all I can really say is that I remember $.03 stamps, and how periodically the price would go up. Escalating postage prices have been a reality all my life. What I can say with certainty is that I was very pleased when the self-stick stamps came along.
Today I keep a stock of notecards and a supply of stamps. I can’t recall the last time I handwrote a letter to anyone, but I do send out a fair number of notecards. I have a supply of them for personal correspondence, but also for my companies and a few of my client organizations.

Similarly, I don’t send many real letters any more. Mostly I send letters via email and sometimes follow up with hard copy – if at all.

We have USPS online account and we use it for sending important documents and books. Priority Mail and Express Mail are great services and we take full advantage of them.
I suppose I should mention the fax machine, as it is a mail substitute and one that I have come to hate. Back in about 1978, when I was working for a newspaper, I first encountered a device they called the Mojo. It was pretty remarkable in that a reporter could write a story and send it to the office through the Mojo – almost magic. Decades later, the office fax came along with rolls of thermal paper. For a while, before email, it became an essential office tool for important documents.

Today the fax machine uses plain paper, which is a good thing. It takes up a phone line, which is bad thing and it also receives mostly junk mail. BUT, I can’t get rid of it for two reasons. First, it is the only secure way to send and receive confidential information (like credit card information). Second, everybody expects an office to have a fax machine. The good news is that it doubles as a back- up copier.

Of course, today we don’t just have mail and faxes to deal with we have e-mail and Tweets and messages sent via social media. These days I get about 700 emails each day and that doesn’t count all the wall posts and Tweets. It is exhausting just thinking about it. We are truly living in the Information Age and it is giving me a headache.