I’m an email devotee who rarely uses the U.S. Postal Service. Still, there are some things you just can’t do online – like send an email to “Stockton Record, Stockton Calif., Ian Hill” and expect that I’d get the message.
Apparently, though, that’s all the information the postal service needs, as shown by this envelope I received yesterday. (Post continues under image.)
But the efficiency of the postal service can have its drawbacks. Consider the following passage from the Vindicator newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio, where I lived and worked before moving to Stockton.
“The day after Thanksgiving, 1962, a bomb planted in the car of racketeer Cadillac Charlie Cavallaro killed him and his 11-year-old son behind their Roslyn Drive home. A week later, a letter was delivered from a Youngstown airman stationed in Duluth, Minn., to his parents, addressed to Mrs. and Mrs. John Diacin, 232 Carroll St., Murdertown, Ohio. Such was the national reputation of Youngstown, thanks to the gangland slayings of the late 1950s and early 1960s.”