Maybe I'm A-Maize-d

The Man Who Invented the Zip Code

In 1961, the volume of magazine and circular mail bundles in the United States averaged 43 million pieces per week, with a total of about 30 billion pieces annually. The U.S. Post Office was still dealing with the loss of many trained employees from World War II and did not have the necessary resources to increase the specialized training required to handle this amount of mail. With mass mail marketing campaigns and magazine circulation on the rise, the U.S. Post Office was searching for ways to manage the exponentially increasing load more effectively.

After spending six years evaluating the operations of the field postal service, Henry Bentley Hahn, Sr. submitted a report entitled, “Proposed Reorganization of the Field Postal Service” as a solution to the developing mail problem. This proposal would later become the, “Zone Improvement Plan,” establishing the ZIP Code and the two-letter state abbreviations. 

The Zone Improvement Plan was announced to the public on November 28, 1962 and implemented on July 1, 1963.

Shortly afterward, reports of success started to come in from the regional postmasters, with minor issues to be addressed. Despite these issues, the ZIP Code was considered by the U.S. Post Office to be a huge success. Some counties saved as much as $10,000 per year, speeding up delivery by up to 48 hours in some locations and easing the process of sorting without a reduction in staff or closing local post offices.  Read More

Welcome to Life in Chains, where writers share the essential roles played in their lives by chain restaurants—great and grim, wonderful and terrible. Here, Cari Wade Gervin on the sort of family…

Perk up your Monday with a memo about coffee.

Staff Secretary Jim Connor’s note on this memo from Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Cheney from October 20, 1975, succinctly sums up why the coffee bill for Donald Rumsfeld’s office was over $100: "They are drinking too much coffee and have too many people drinking it!"

The Mess records showed that the bill covered 200 pots of coffee, meaning that the Chief of Staff and his eight staff members would have consumed about 10 pots per day during a five-day work week.

Did somebody say it was GROVER’S BIRTHDAY?

40th Anniversary of the Nixon Pardon: The Announcement

Ladies and gentlemen, I have come to a decision which I felt I should tell you and all of my fellow American citizens, as soon as I was certain in my own mind and in my own conscience that it is the right thing to do.

At 11:05 a.m. on September 8, 1974, President Ford addressed the nation from the Oval Office to announce his decision to “grant a full, free and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed.”

Listen to President Ford’s remarks from the White House Communications Agency Audio Recordings of President Gerald R. Ford’s Speeches, Remarks and News Conferences. A transcript is available here.