Since 1874, the J.W. Westcott Company has served the Great Lakes Waterways, delivering mail and freight to cargo ships on the Detroit River.Zak Rosen provided an audio postcard for Front and Center – Chicago Public Media’s new series about the Great Lakes.

Detroit’s Floating Post Office from WBEZ on Vimeo.

via Postcard: Detroit’s floating post office | WBEZ.

WASHINGTON, March 29, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Philip F. Rubio, assistant professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University has been awarded the Rita Lloyd Moroney Senior Prize from the U.S. Postal Service for his book, There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2010).

The Rita Lloyd Moroney Awards are designed to encourage study and publication of the history of the American postal system and to raise awareness about the significance of the postal system in American life. They include the Senior Prize ($2,000) for work published by faculty members, independent scholars, public historians, and other non-degree candidates and the Junior Prize ($1,000) for work written or published by undergraduates or graduate students.

This year’s Junior Prize has been presented to Joseph M. Adelman for his article, "’A Constitutional Conveyance of Intelligence, Public and Private’: The Post Office, the Business of Printing, and the American Revolution," published in the journal Enterprise & Society, 11 (no. 4, 2010). He wrote this article while a doctoral student in History at Johns Hopkins University.

The Moroney Awards are intended for scholarship on any topic on the history of the American postal system from the colonial era to the present — including the history of the imperial postal system that preceded the establishment of the American postal system in 1775. Though submissions must be historical in character, they can draw on the methods of disciplines other than history, for example, geography, cultural studies, literature, communications, or economics. Comparative or international historical studies are eligible if the American postal system is central to the discussion.

Rita Lloyd Moroney, the awards’ namesake, began conducting historical research for the Postmaster General in 1962 and later served as of the U.S. Postal Service historian from 1973 to 1991. Additional information on these awards and application instructions are at usps.com/postalhistory/moroneyaward.htm.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 — The U.S. Postal Service issued the following news release:

A University of South Carolina professor is this year’s recipient of the Rita Lloyd Moroney Award from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), recognizing excellence in published works involving USPS history.

Allison Marsh, a professor in the department of history, University of South Carolina, Columbia, was honored with the Senior Prize for the article “Greetings from the Factory Floor: Industrial Tourism and the Picture Postcard,” published in the October 2008 issue of Curator: The Museum Journal.

Sheila Brennan also was recognized, receiving the Junior Prize for her work, “Stamping American Memory: Stamp Collecting in the U.S., 1880s-1930s.” Brennan wrote the paper as her Ph.D. dissertation in 2009 while a graduate student at George Mason University in Virginia.

The U.S. Postal Service sponsors two annual prizes for scholarship on the history of the American postal system, the Rita Lloyd Moroney Awards. Scholarship by senior scholars (faculty members, independent scholars and public historians) is eligible for a $2,000 award. Scholarship by junior scholars (undergraduates and graduate students) is eligible for a $1,000 award.

The awards are intended for scholarship on any topic on the history of the American postal system from the colonial era to the present — including the history of the imperial postal system that preceded the establishment of the American postal system in 1775.

The award is named after Rita Lloyd Moroney, who began conducting historical research for the Postmaster General in 1962 and served as U.S. Postal Service historian from 1973 to 1991. Additional information on these awards and application instructions are at www.usps.com/postalhistory/moroney.

If you haven’t read the original newspaper story about Lucky and the mailman, it’s located here.

If you have read it, you know it ended with a bit of a cliff-hanger: did Mr. Donovan get his old route back? Did Lucky ever see him again?

We can now reveal the true answers to those questions: No! and more importantly, YES!

Arthur Donovan apparently didn’t ever get his old route back, but he did retire less than a year after the transfer. And what did he do as soon as he retired? Started visiting his old friend Lucky every day. The story of Arthur and Lucky’s reunion was a national story, just like the original story the year before. This clipping is from a Corpus Christi newspaper.

The radio reminds me that today is the 90th anniversary of the Halifax Disaster. On December 6, 1917, two munitions ships collided in Halifax harbor, resulting in the largest manmade explosion prior to the introduction of nuclear weapons. Two thousand people are believed to have died.

Several years ago, the late columnist John Gould told the story of the disaster from the viewpoint of his father, a Railway Post Office clerk who worked on the Boston to Halifax Maritime Express:

The Halifax disaster, seen from a railway post office
Christian Science Monitor

More postal history from the Southwest- this time it’s Tucson’s turn:

It was a bone-jarring, elbow-jabbing ride through hostile Apache country. At one time it was also about the best way in or out of Tucson. The next time you’re whining about taking off your shoes at the airport, say to yourself: “It could be worse. I could be a passenger on the Jackass Mail.” Named not for the stagecoach passengers’ temperaments but for the fact that they had to get out of the coach and ride mule-back over the route’s roughest spots, the Jackass Mail first lurched into Tucson the summer of 1857.

Mail service helped to put Tucson on the map Arizona Daily Star

The Sierra Sun has an interesting piece about the early history of airmail in the American West. A sample:

On a flight to Reno in March 1927, Burr Winslow had an oil line break on him as he was crossing Donner Summit. Blinded by leaking oil, he managed to cut his motor off, and glide into the Truckee emergency field. The rough, hard crusted snow on the strip caused the nose of the plane to dig into the snow, flipping over the biplane on its back. Winslow was unhurt, but the plane was badly damaged. The mail and pilot were hauled to Truckee by sleigh, and put on the train to continue the trip eastward.

Sierra Air Mail pilots: heroes of the sky

If you think labor relations in the USPS are not so hot these days, check out this film from 1978:

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