Jim Bradshaw: Putting the ZIP in mail delivery

It was not universally popular when five-digit postal ZIP codes went into effect 60 years ago, on July 1, 1963. And that’s probably an understatement.

Newspapers across south Louisiana — and everywhere else — had dutifully run near-identical press releases about what the Post Office people called a “revolutionary new system of improved mail dispatch and delivery.”
Postmasters, who filled in the blanks with their names and their town’s code before sending the handout to their local paper, “stressed the importance of all citizens … learning [their] city’s ZIP code and using it in their return address on all correspondence.”

That important instruction touched on the big bugaboo in the minds of a lot of mailers — and there were still a lot of them in those days when nobody had even dreamed of something called “social media,” let alone the technology that has made it possible. People still wrote long letters to each other and sent them through the mail, even though they grumbled that a first-class stamp had gone up to five cents — to a dollar for a book of 20!

The new dilemma was that they could put their ZIP in their return address, but where did they find the one needed to speed a letter to Aunt Lottie in Port Arthur?

You can imagine how many people took the trip to a post office and waited  patiently while a clerk thumbed through a thick book to find it.

The other way to go, the postal handout said, was to keep your address book handy and to write down Aunt Lottie’s ZIP as soon as you got a letter from her.

That way we’d eventually have the ZIPs for everyone on our Christmas card list, presuming that Aunt Lottie remembered to put her ZIP in her return address, and we took the time to dig out the address book and write it down (before losing the
envelope).

The Post Office hoped that the people would catch on to the idea that ZIP (an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan) would send their letters zipping along faster than ever. 

Without ZIP, according to the announcement, the address on a letter had to be read “as many as eight or ten times by postal employees to get it to the proper destination.”

With ZIP, however, “a clerk needs only to glance at the code to know immediately to what national area, state and post office the letter is destined, and to speed it on its way.”

The ZIP code replaced another system that most people thought worked just fine.

That one involved Postal District Numbers in places that were big enough to be divided into zones. Letters were addressed to John Doe, 1234 Main St., Anytown, 16, Anystate.

The “16” indicated which part of town or branch post office the letter should go to.

The postal union and some mailers suspected that the new ZIP code was a first step toward automated mail sorting (meaning a machine would put a clerk out of work), and they got even more suspicious when, just a few months after rolling out the big ZIP campaign, the Post Office issued “Publication 59: Abbreviations for Use with ZIP Code.”

That changed all of the state abbreviations that we’d learned in geography class (La., Calif., Mich., etc.) to two-letters, un-punctuated, upper case (LA, CA, MI).

The rationale was that longer abbreviations for the states often made the last line too long for “major addressing systems,” which sounded suspiciously like something involving machines, not people.

English teachers howled that the new abbreviations were ungrammatical as well as confusing, but postmasters such as Howard Durant in St. Martinville, Thomas Patin in Breaux Bridge, and Lloyd Chachere in Eunice, each promised via their press releases that with the abbreviations and ZIP code “the United States will have the most modern system of mail distribution and delivery in existence.”

We’ve pretty much seen how that’s worked out, haven’t we?

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.