© Copyright 2004 Jeanne Shannon
All Rights Reserved

Out here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the mail on our street arrives at mid-day. The postman (or woman) parks the white U.S. Postal Service van on Espejo Street and delivers piles of junk mail, bills, magazines, and catalogs to our door. Occasionally there is a letter from a friend or relative. Other mail arrives, of course, across the waves of cyberspace at all hours of the day and night.

I think back to my childhood in the early 1940s in Dickenson County, Virginia, and how different mail and its delivery were in that time and place. I lived with my parents, Tolly and Della (Beverly) Boyd, and my grandmother, Palmyra (Lipps) Boyd, at my great-grandfather Jim Lipps's homeplace at the Wise County line (now Camp Jacob). My parents didn't own a car, so once a week my father would saddle our brown mare, Molly, and ride to Camp Creek to buy groceries at Milburn Swindall's store near Little Zion Old Regular Baptist Church. On these trips he would also pick up our mail at the Norland Post Office across the truss bridge on the other side of the Pound River. There would be letters from my mother's family in Wise County and from my grandmother's sisters in Pedro, Ohio and Eubank, Kentucky, or from her son in Glen Alum, West Virginia. Sometimes there would be a letter for my mother, a teacher in the country schools, from James M. Skeen, Superintendent of Schools of Dickenson County. 

In charge of the Norland Post Office during those years were postmistress Jenny Owens, and later (or was it earlier?) postmaster Lacy "Bub" Davis. Mr. Davis's wife was named Alma and they had a son named Garland Malone and a daughter whose name may have been Kay.

I always looked forward to Daddy's trips to the post office when a package from Sears or Montgomery Ward was expected. We bought almost all of our clothing and shoes from mail-order catalogs, as well as special things my parents sometimes ordered for me, such as a blue-and-red toy ukulele, or a Nancy Drew mystery about the goings-on in an old attic or near a haunted bridge. One package I remember vividly contained a zinc peck bucket full of hard candy, the Christmas "treat" my mother would give her pupils at Osborne's Gap School. Daddy and I helped her divide the candy into little "pokes," as we called paper bags. With both my parents watching, I had to resist the temptation to eat more than my share.

Though today's mailboxes are inundated with catalogs, in those days there were only four or five that arrived regularly, and they were welcomed enthusiastically. The "big books" from Sears, Roebuck and Company, Montgomery Ward, Spiegel May Stern, and Chicago Mail Order (later Aldens) were indeed "wish books" that the whole family took turns perusing by the light of our kerosene lamps in the evening. (Of course we had no electricity in those days.) 

The only magazines we received were The Southern Agriculturist and mother's teacher's magazines, The Normal Instructor, The Grade Teacher, and the Virginia Journal of Education. Later The Christian Herald arrived regularly after my grandmother received a gift subscription from her son in West Virginia.

The only newspaper that came was The Dickenson County Herald, published in Clintwood by Sewell Beverly. When I was learning to read, I took pride in my attempts to read portions of the Herald aloud to my family. Once there was an item about my parents and me in which I was referred to as the Boyds' "small daughter," a term I didn't like very much-for wasn't I already a big girl who could read and write? 

Occasionally there would be catalogs and bulletins from Radford College, where my mother had received her teacher training, and I loved looking at the pictures of the Radford campus and hearing my mother talk about her summers there as a student in the 1920s.

Although my parents had chosen to receive their mail at the Norland Post Office, others had their mail delivered to their doors. Ulysses S. Grant Mullins carried the mail on horseback between two rural post offices (Freeling and Almira, I believe) and delivered mail to our next-door neighbors. When my grandmother, the major correspondent in the family, had a letter to mail, it was my task to listen for the clip-clop of Grant's horse's hooves on the dirt road, so that someone could go out and hand him the letter. One neighbor with a progressive turn of mind built a wooden mailbox complete with flag that could be raised to indicate outgoing mail, and sometimes we put our letters to Kentucky and Ohio in that box.

After I learned to write, another task I had was to address ("back") the envelopes for the letters my grandmother wrote. She did not think her handwriting was very good and she did not want it to be seen on the outside of her letters. Writing for her was a long, laborious process, for in today's terminology she was "borderline illiterate." She would sit for hours, laboriously forming each word on a blue-lined sheet of tablet paper. She had attended "subscription writing schools" for a few weeks in her childhood in the 1880s, but her mother had discouraged this schooling for her daughters, afraid that it would result in "writing letters to boys."

In the 1940s postage for a first-class letter was 3 cents, and the "penny postcard" was still a reality. Christmas cards could be mailed for 1-1/2 cents each if the envelope flaps were tucked in and not sealed. Addresses were simple; often no route numbers, box numbers, or street addresses were required. My grandmother's letter to her sister Maude would be addressed simply to "Mrs. M. M. Owens, Pedro, Ohio." And the zip code was still two decades in the future.

There was little variety of stamp patterns then—no flags, oranges, apples, flowers, birds, statues of liberty, or faces of famous people. The plain purple 3-cent stamp changed little over the years, although I believe it carried a special "victory" design during the years of World War II.

How the years move on, and everything changes. But still in my mind's and heart's eye I can still see Grant Mullins riding by on his big bay horse, and Daddy hitching Molly outside the Norland Post Office and going in to ask Bub Davis for our mail. 

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