The United States Postal System keeps changing. Sometimes for better but not always.

Seventy-years ago the post office was flirting with discontinuing twice daily mail delivery in Superior. From reading back issues of this newspaper, it appears the post office tested cutting back to once a day in the residential area while preserving twice daily service in the business district. Eventually, the decision was made to discontinue the twice daily service to both residential and business customers.

When I built the West Third Street car wash in 1970, the former operator of a self-service laundry advised not to install a pay phone. He said installing a pay phone in his laundry was a mistake for patrons were continuously calling to report problems.

I joked that since the post office maintained a mail receptacle on the corner, I was going to provide post cards the disgruntled customers could use to submit complaints. In those days the post office had boxes around town that were regularly checked before dispatch time. To mail a letter it was necessary to go to the post office.

This week, for the first time some of our Kansas customers who receive mail from the Superior post office, will notice an address change. They no longer live at Superior. Instead the postal folks have decided the proper city and state is North Montana Township, Kansas. The zip code has not changed. It is still 68978 which signifies not only Nebraska but that section of Nebraska that was once handled by the Hastings Sectional Center.

One hundred ten years ago the postal service introduced parcel post service. Customers liked the new service and took advantage of the expanded regulations to mail things like eggs, live bees, chickens and even an entire building (one brick at a time). The building was a two-story, block long structure built to house a bank some 150 miles away from the brick yard. The brick company cut transportation cost in half by shipping via parcel post in 1916. Farmers were even shipping tons of corn to market via the mail. When the gigantic shipment of bricks tied up the mail route completely, regulations were changed to put a limit of 200 pounds on the weight of parcel post that one individual could send to another in one day.

This week I have had to mail a suit jacket to an Omaha salesman who forgot and left it at the newspaper office,

The most unusual deliveries occurred between 1910 and 1920 as numerous customers mailed children via parcel post. In 1920, this practice was officially banned.

Shortly after the service was introduced an Ohio family became the first the ship a live baby. The boy weighting 10 3/4 pounds was wrapped and mailed on a rural route to an address in town. The baby was well wrapped and was within the 11 pound limit. The postage was 15 cents and the “Parcel” was insured for $50. He safely arrived at his destination. That wouldn’t work today because the shipment would have to go to a central processing plant and take days not hours as it did in the last century.

When the practice of mailing children first began, it only occurred with rural carriers well-known by the families sending their precious packages to town. But as the practice grew, some children traveled greater distances.

A Fargo, North Dakota, paper reported “Railroad officials are glad the limit of dimensions and weight for parcel post packages are not great enough to include adult human beings.”

An Arizona paper reported on a six-year-old girl who arrived in Phoenix from Los Angeles via parcel post. The youngster said the trip was okay but she wished they hadn’t stuck “Those ugly stamps on my new dress and sweater.”

An eight-year-old boy with stamps and address affixed to a tag tied on his arm was mailed from Danville, Illinois to Coal City, Indiana.

I never thought of sending children by mail but I remember when my father had minnows shipped by bus.

When I was going to school in Manhattan, Kansas, I was sometimes asked to bring minnows back to Superior.

Minnows were commonly sold by the gallon and generally my father or W. L. Wilcox would leave before sunup and drive to the Lexington area for minnows. They had a custom tank built with compartments and aerators. They took orders from area bait dealers and once a week they made the run to their supplier’s farm. My father aimed to have gotten the bait and made the deliveries before 10 a.m.

But there were times when he ordered minnows from a dealer in Topeka. Water and minnows were added to a plastic bag which was inflated with oxygen and taken to the Topeka bus station for shipment to Manhattan. I was to meet the bus when it arrived in Manhattan and then drive directly home---no stops or dilly-dallying allowed or the fish would run out of oxygen and die.

As a youngster I sometimes hitched rides to town so I could play in the park or go swimming but never with our mail carrier.