Do Letters Wait Your Returning?

July 11, 1927

Letting dun letters and bills collect in the old home mail box while you escape for two week’s romance from the workday year sounds plausible – but it isn’t.

Mail waits for no man, be it the dentist’s last word or a true love letter.

Some of the missives that vacationists are expected to peruse on return to the regular routine are nestling in the dead letter office, according to postmaster H. C. Kramp.

Others have gone back to their senders, unclaimed.

Postmen are not mind readers and have no way of knowing that John Brown, present address unknown, will return as soon as he accumulates a healthy sunburn and will then be at leisure to read his mail.

If letters were saved for all the El Pasoans and ex-citizens who departed without forwarding addresses, soon the combined warehouse area of the town would not hold them. Much less could one postoffice capacity be stretched to surround the stack.

Which is another reason why the department of the mails cannot work on the theory that John Brown is certain to return to the place he was seen last and that he didn’t want to be troubled with his correspondence on an outing.

Prompt delivery or speedy return to the writer is, furthermore, the first obligation of the postal service. That is part of the service paid for in the stamp.

When a return address is given and all the clues have been exhausted in search for the person directed, the matter is simple enough. But when the name of the sender is lacking and all probable addresses have been tried, nothing remains but the dead letter office.

Moral is: Leave a forwarding address.

Writing directions home from the Bahamas or the island paradise of the Pacific is by no means the equivalent of leaving the address behind. Many letters are lost by just such a process, leaving a period of several days or even a day in which a letter has no place to go – and therefore gets lost.

Providing against just this danger, the postoffice in El Paso keeps five volumes of the city directory instead of one.

Blank sheets are inserted between the pages to provide space for correcting every address change on the day it is made.

Precautions against loss have developed into an elaborate system of checking and rechecking. Two clerks spend all their time verifying addresses in the directory and running down clues of stray identities and addresses.

On the same day that a notice of address change is sent to the office, it is noted in the five volume corrected directory and notice of the transfer is given to the postman on the new and on the old route.

Letting the mail wait or come trailing along after the pictures are hung sounds plausible yet this delay should be most avoided as being the cause of the most lost mail, according to Mr. Kramp.

Comments

[Letters to the Philippines]

Thank you so much for bringing up this,for me receiving letters like an old style before is more romantic things,:) if you noticed at this moment of time the letters comes from a post office is more decreasing than before because for the new technologies most fastest receiving message unlike before,but for me i like the old one.

missy

[Tooth Whitening Blackpool]

Returning concept explained nicely with concept information and useful ideas.