Aunt Minnie provides a history lesson
After posting the “Aunt Minnie” item last week, I started wondering about Auntie’s origins. The web makes it easy to look for obscure things like that, although actually finding them may be a different story. Aunt Minnie shows up in Victorian era stories, and popular plays from the 1920’s and ’30’s, but the oldest specifically postal mention I found was from 1949- a story in the New York Times describing a railroad car fire that had destroyed a large amount of mail. The story noted that “Postal Inspectors are salvaging what they can and passing it along to the addressees. But there are some persons who will never get the letter that Aunt Minnie mailed last week in Long Beach…”
The most interesting story, though, was from 1970, the year the Postal Service was born in its current form. The piece, reporting on the “fourth annual National Postal Forum”, describes the service’s “tough approach to the reorganization of the nation’s mail services.” The headline reads “USPS vows to rival private business”. (!) And here’s something you’ll never hear a USPS official say these days: “‘The new ball game is to interfere with private enterprise’ said Ronald B. Lee, the Assistant Postmaster General for planning and marketing.’” Lee goes on to say that the “new Postal Service would follow aggressive sales techniques that might drive some companies out of business, find new ways of cooperation with others and require fierce competition with the rest.” Now those were the days! Yes, friends, there really was a time before the All Government Is Bad religion took over in DC, when you could say things like that without being tarred and feathered!
In an echo of current controversies, the story points out that “All the panels at the forum were oriented to the problems of mass mailers, which Mr. Lee called an obvious bias since ‘87 percent of all mail is for business transactions’. Nevertheless, Postal Service officials were quick to state that they would not forget ‘Aunt Suzie’ or ‘Aunt Minnie’ [there she is!], the individual who still prefers to write a personal letter rather than use the telephone”
As for the future, then Postmaster General Winton Blount suggested the Postal Service might diversify into other areas. The Mailgram program was mentioned as an example of a new service based on the use of new technologies. C. Peter Mc Colough, whom the story describes as the president of “Zerox”, suggests that fax transmission may take the place of human carriers, and offers this view of the future: “You will have a terminal in your office, perhaps another in your home- an ‘electronic mailbox’. All of us could be linked into this vast instantaneous network and our correspondence could go out over the network quickly, accurately and in a cost-effective manner.’” (Remember- this is 1970- years before the Internet was even thought of, and in fact, the year that Xerox PARC, the birthplace of the mouse, the graphic user interface and so much more, was founded.)
The article gives the last word to Mr. Lee, and it’s a quote that will make you stop and think: “If we are still in the business of delivering three-dimensional mail 25 years from now, we will be on our way out of business”.