I was on a sunny stroll down a street in my micro-hood when I saw a woman with a clipboard in front of me. As I passed her, she nodded and smiled at me, then ticked a box on the paper on the clipboard. That was when I heard a man speak to a person in the doorway of a nearby house: “She’s just checking on me,” said the man, who was dressed in the blue shorts and white shirt of the US Postal Service. “Tell her what a good job I’m doing,” he added. The postal delivery person continued on to each house on the street, shadowed by his auditor. I thought, not for the first time, about the intimacy and antiquity of that kind of personal delivery.
I have a friend who lives alone. She has installed an alert system that emits a tone when someone approaches her door. Most days, that someone is her postman (who tones, twice). Her mailbox is attached to the side of her doorway, an easy reach for her through her opened door. My friend and I share an old-school affection for the traditional ways of communicating: we write letters to each other. She is an artist, and has handmade small books of letters to me; I in return, would sometimes send sketches to her on the letters written on handmade paper I would purchase from bookstores. Sometimes those sketches were on the outside of the envelope; when they were, her postman would place that letter in a prominent position in her mailbox. “That would be the first thing I would see,” she told me.
We live in one of the most technologically sophisticated countries in the world; the Internet brings that world to our doorstep, and we can conduct most of our business from the comfort of our computer stations. We can do our banking online, pay our bills, purchase tickets and check our investments online. But we still have a postal system where a person walks our neighborhood and up to our door, hand-delivering our mail. That postal system is the outgrowth of a desire to enhance communications between the American colonies.
According to History.com, Benjamin Franklin “invested nearly 40 years in the establishment of a reliable system of private communications,” in the early colonies. Franklin was already an established writer, printer and publisher, with the newspaper he purchased in 1729, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and his Poor Richard’s Almanack, which he started publishing in 1733. Franklin was a “joint postmaster general of the colonies” from 1753 to 1774, during which time he streamlined postal delivery and established standardized rates “based upon weight and distance.”
In the mid-1800s, a looming civil war gave urgency to the idea of creating a faster system of communications from the Midwest to California. The Pony Express filled this need, and though it lasted only 19 months — between 1860 and 1861 — it perpetuated the notion that the nation deserves fast and personal connections between its various persons and parts.
Two-hundred-thirty-eight years ago, on November 7th 1776, Richard Bache Franklin was postmaster general; Franklin was in France, soliciting that nation’s support on behalf of the Continental Congress. Franklin’s establishment of a postal service is reflected in the efforts put forth today, by the people who drive and tread the streets of our neighborhoods, placing mail in our boxes. I have gotten to know some of those people over the years, and received the benefit of caring and personal service similar to the kindnesses delivered to my friend by her postman. For that, I must say, “Thanks, Ben.”