What would you think if you got that message relayed to you? Would you wonder what the heck it was about? My beloved sent me a little clip that was on the Oldtimers Facebook page with the following picture from the Smithsonian Magazine.
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According to the post, prior to 1920, you could actually mail children in the US, as long as they met a few rules. They had to weigh under 50 pounds, and their clothes were used to stick stamps on as payment. Surprisingly, mailing kids often turned out cheaper than sending them by train. During their postal journey, they would ride in the train’s mail car, where mail clerks looked after them and made sure they had something to eat. One famous case saw a child sent over 700 miles, from Florida to Virginia, for just 15 cents in stamps.
WHAT?
After some further research and an article in the Smithsonian Magazine, I discovered that this was probably partially true but not totally the normal case. I mean, really, who would think this was a safe and healthy way to get a child from point A to point B?
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As the story goes, an Ohio couple, Jesse and Mathilda Beagle, “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived about a mile away in Batavia. The baby, James, was just shy of the 11-pound weight limit for packages sent via Parcel Post, and his “delivery” cost his parents only 15 cents in postage (although they did insure him for $50). The quirky story soon made newspapers, and for the next several years, similar stories would occasionally surface as other parents followed suit.
So the actual mailing was only a mile and it was probably done in a timely fashion and that baby was not held in a stifling hot mail truck for hours on end. So a cute story but probably not really all that shocking . Not that “I” would mail one of my children but I guess Jesse and Mathilda Beagle did.
Finally, in June of 1920 there was an announcement that the practice of mailing children was simply not appropriate and it would not be a service that was offered. I think that is probably a good thing. What do you think?
