When our youngest granddaughter went with us to pick up the newspapers in the front yard not long ago, she asked why the mailman left the papers on the driveway.
It was a thought-provoking question that accented vast changes in both the newspaper industry and mail service in my lifetime.
Those newspapers were thrown by a carrier, of course, and not dropped in the yard by a mailman. Regina and I are old-fashioned, and we still like to read printed newspapers.
We get online editions of those papers and others, and I read them on my laptop most days before picking them up in the yard. But it still feels good to turn the pages of an oldfangled newspaper.
My parents had morning and afternoon papers thrown in their front yard when I lived there. I couldn’t wait to read the baseball box scores and the comics.
I subscribed to area newspapers here for decades, and the local man who delivered them had the papers in the front yard when I woke up every day rain or shine.
Since newspapers started offering combinations or options of online and home delivery, I have tried to keep getting printed papers tossed in the yard.
Delivery is erratic at times, and calling to deal with the problem results in incessant recorded messages and maybe eventually a conversation with someone far away who could not care less if I get a paper.
Our granddaughter’s assumption that the mailman left papers in the yard reflects her understanding of our modern system of home deliveries. Letters, publications, packages and anything else related to mail is hand-carried to our residences.
All those things arrive in little U.S. Postal Service vehicles with the steering wheel on the wrong side, brown UPS trucks with open doors for quick exits and entrances or the Fed Ex trucks that suggest your package started out somewhere on an airplane.
Mail was not delivered to our house when I was growing up. We had a post office box in Cullen. My folks had been using the box for so long and the post office was so small that our address was just two numbers. It was something like P.O. Box 28, Cullen, La.
There was no such thing as zip codes then so our address should have been easy to remember.
But my dad’s eccentric great uncle Willie from Bogalusa must have had trouble recalling the official address when he sent one of his long, rambling hand-written letters.
He just addressed them to G.L. Pierce, Boss Man of the Paper Mill, Cullen, La. My dad always got the letters but worried that some the real boss men of the mill might see them.
Dad was a foreman, which his uncle must have thought was a pretty top level position. But there were a lot of folks at the mill who were higher up in the pecking order than he was.
Our mail box was in Cullen since that’s where the mill was located. We could walk the mile or so from the mill village where we lived to Cullen to pick up the mail and get things at Barrett’s Grocery and Burnham’s Drug Store.
The mill was right across the street from that shopping mecca, so my dad could walk to work when his old car wouldn’t start.
All of us went to school in Springhill then because there were no schools in Cullen. It caused confusion to tell people you were in school in Springhill but your address was in Cullen.
Dad decided we needed a Springhill address, so he got a box at the post office there. But he worried that it was such a big building with so many boxes that our mail would get lost.
I had the combination and went by once in a while during high school to check the box, but there was never anything there. We always had mail, including all the things my folks ordered from Sears, at the Cullen post office.
After I left home for college and work, my dad told me he had gotten a home delivery address at 229 Third Street. But he told me to keep mailing things to the Cullen post office and not to the house.
He must have been worried that the mailman would do like our granddaughter thought and just throw his mail in the front yard.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES