Postcards from the past when letters took the bus

Ed Vendell shows his father's presidential
appointment from Pres. Harry Truman

Ed Vendell hit the philatelic pot of gold when Harry Truman made him Ogden's Postmaster.

What better way to get first crack at all the cool stamps, he was told, and he did.

Vendell was postmaster from 1944 to 1969, a period of great change in both the world and the Postal Service. The passenger train was fading away, and the change was blasting the economic core of cities like Ogden.  Not incidentally, it was also forcing the Postal Service to figure out another way to move the mails.

Except for air mail, rails move the mail across the country. For decades the Postal Service used specially fitted rail cars to carry postal workers who sorted out local mail and dropped it off at whistle stops along the way.

Harry Truman's signature

But those mail cars had to run on regular schedule, which meant hooking them to passenger trains. When the passenger trains quit, the mail needed another way.

So the Postal Service turned to the highways, the very things that were busily killing off passenger rails.

On Aug. 28, 1949, The Denver and Rio Grande railroad discontinued  passenger service on its Marysvale branch in Northern Utah, leaving 20 communities between Salt lake City and Richfield stranded. The Post Office put trucks into service to fill the gap, and looked around for a more permanent solution.

It settled on buses.

Post card shows a typical Highway Post Office
bus.

The Post Office had been using buses for Highway Post Office work since 1940, although the program was interrupted by World War II. After the war it picked up again, eventually running 208 routes around the United States.

Postal workers inside the buses would sort mail for the communities by hand, putting letters into huge racks of pigeon holes on the wall or big mail bags set in racks.

By all accounts it was not fun -- railroad cars ride relatively smoothly, while buses have to negotiate turns, chuckholes, traffic and all the rest. News accounts say the workers in back got bumped around a lot.

The Postal Service bought three of the buses, one to go each direction daily and a spare. The first trip, a ceremonial run, was Jan. 22, a Sunday. Instead of mail the bus carried officials and press to record the historic event.

One of the officials was Ed Vendell, Ogden Postmaster.

Vendell took advantage of the day to get every possible postal souvenir he could. They had "first trip" post cards, first trip covers (envelopes with stamps) and even a Highway Post Office picture post card.

The covers have several varieties of stamps and special commemorative "First Trip" cancellation marks. He also got cards with autographs of everyone on the bus, including the driver.

He went along on Monday, the first official mail run, and got more covers and special stamps.

The whole pile was part of a collection of First Day Covers (stamped envelopes cancelled on the first day a new stamp is issued) that Postmaster Vendell left to his son, Ed Vendell, when he died in 1985. Ed Jr. didn't know what to do with the covers, which have little cash value, so he donated them to the Union Station archive.

A shoebox full of these first day covers found their way to my desk. In sorting them I found the Highway Post Office cards and realized the historic link between the Railroad Post Office and the Highway Post Office.

Union Station has a fully restored RPO car in its collection, and Postmaster Vendell certainly spent a lot of time at Union Station because the station was a key mail

Souvenir post card

sorting site for the whole state.

Ed Vendell volunteers in the Browning-Kimball Car Museum on Wednesday afternoons. When he came in to talk to me he brought a special surprise: His dad's appointment as postmaster of Ogden, signed by President Harry Truman.

It's a wonderful historic document that he wanted kept with his dad's cover collection which is, in its turn, a part of Ogden's transportation history.

The Highway Post Offices didn't last. Automatic sorting machines, the Zip code, and then computer sorting, made those guys tossing letters into racks of pigeon holes obsolete. The last HPO stopped running in 1974, but Utah's lone route quit in 1959.

My special thanks to the Mobile Post Office Society (link to their web site is here -- click) where you can find out more about Railroad and Highway Post Offices. The Smithsonian Postal Museum also has some wonderful information on its postal museum blog (click!) and some good detailed information on how the Highway Post Office worked.

Trip 2, showing autographs of the crew and
passengers

Ah, the good old days, when we incinerated "Japs" gladly

A pile of donated newspapers tell Ogden the story of the war in 1945.

OK, the headline is a bit harsh. Politically incorrect, for sure..

I mean: Japs?

No No No No No. Rewrite would have a cow. The publisher would be on the phone. Job security would be dicey.

But that is now.  Now is when we're all careful to talk about folks nicely, even if they're our enemies. Notice we never refer to folks in the middle east rudely, even those Islamic State head choppers? We write lots of stories saying they're evil, and brutal, and not nice, but nobody calls them "turbaned tootsies" or whatever.

Because that would be rude.

We're careful to eschew violence, too.  "Collateral damage," which means innocent civilians, is never approved of, even when we do it.

And if we do do it, well, we call it "collateral damage" to make it sound nicer. "Blew innocent folks to smithereens" has such a harsh sound.

But in 1945, that's how it was. Japs were Japs and the US of A was quite open that it was doing its best to incinerate people. Bragged about it, even. "Burning like all hell," says the news story.

People bought bonds
to pay for the war.

We were incinerating Tokyo, and Yokohama, and anywhere else we could find in Japan that looked as if it needed incinerating.  We were at war,  Japan they had bombed Pearl Harbor, war is very ugly and we, the American people, were doing our level best to make it uglier..

This sort of thing always makes me wonder at those folks who are nostalgic for the past.

Wartime rationing of tires

Which past? A past where entire cities were being incinerated?  Where folks were dying in the Dust Bowl? The 20s were booze was illegal? The teens where we had World War I? the 50s in the US was kind of peaceful and prosperous, sort of, if you ignore the racism, the Korean War and the first stirrings of Vietnam.

And folks who think it has never, ever, been worse than it is right now need to get out more, go spend some time wandering around the microfilm collection at the library and get a little perspective.

What got me thinking this way was a box of old newspapers sent to Union Station's archive by Robert Smith, former WSU provost and now running the Idyllwild, California, historical society.

Robert was going through a box full of donated newspapers a while back and came across this pile of Standard-Examiners.

Would we like them? Absolutely.

The newspapers are from May and June of 1945. They were originally mailed to L. J. Gratton, 2929 Rodeo Road, LA. After Mr. Gratton got done reading them he apparently piled them away.

Now they're back in Ogden, having completed a journey of several thousand miles and 69 years.

They're fun for the perspective on the lives of our parents and grandparents that they give.

Sure the news is full of war, but it was good news.

In 1945 the war in Europe was won and the war in the Pacific was rolling to a victorious conclusion. Admiral "Bull" Halsey was smashing up the Japanese Navy, the Air Force was sending 500-plane waves of B-29s over Japan, raining fire and death.

Why did newspapers use what we now consider an epithet -- Jap -- to refer to the Japanese? After all, weren't there a lot of Japanese Americans who might be offended.

Nope. Remember, in 1945 everyone who looked Japanese was still regarded with suspicion. The US had rounded up all the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and hustled them off to concentration camps in Utah and other places. This was pure racism -- Why weren't Germans rounded up? -- and anyone who qualified deserved no respect.

The S-E cheers the torching of a massive city.

It didn't hurt that "Jap" was a nice short word. Newspaper headline writers love short words when they're writing heads for one-column stories:

"Japs Crumbling
In Southern
Okinawa Defense"

(An aside -- when I started in newspapers in the late 70s the paper I was working as a copy editor called the US Supreme Court the "High-9" for the same reason.)

It wasn't all bloodthirsty news, though. Frank Francis, former Ogden mayor and founder of the Ogden "Examiner," later merged with the Standard, wrote a daily column called "News and Views."

His column for one day, May 29, 1945, has the expected cheering for more demolition by fire of Japan and the attendant roasting alive of the folks there. "This is the proper procedure by which to take the war conceit out of the Japs," he said. "For a long time after Pearl Harbor they were a cocky people, who accepted tghe war as leading on to a glorious finale. Now they are being made to realize the dreaded side, and the roaring flames do much to impress them with wars horrors."

Take that!

Wartime rationing even hit beer making.
That's how you knew the war was serious.

But his column also had time for a more pleasant note.

Francis spent a lot of time here at Union Station, perhaps even visiting the folks who worked in the office I now get to work in. He would stop and look around, if only to escape the horrors of the world's news, and what he saw was what I see, sitting here right now.

"Every day travelers off the trains stand at the eastern entrance to Union Station entranced at the majesty of the Wasatch range looking down on them," he said.

"Strangers express a dsire to stroll to the mountains. Many are deceived by distances in the view. They would attempt to walk to the hills, if they had only a few minutes and, thus impelled, find themselves defeated."

"By the way, many postcards are on sale at the newsstands, but none of them do justice to the snow-capped mountains at the edge of Ogden."

Then he went back to talking about the war.

Union Station Mobbed by Cycling Nationals

Riders line up in Grand Lobby of Union Station
For 2014 Cycling Masters Road National Championships

Got to Union Station this afternoon to a real mob scene; registration for the 2014 USA Cycling Masters Road National Championships.

This is a major deal. Organizers say more than 850 individual riders are registered for four days of mad cycling around Ogden, Ogden Valley and Antelope Island. All the riders are 35 years and older, which is where the "Masters" part comes in but, I can testify, being older doesn't mean slower or weaker or less mean out on the road.

Michael Ackley, ready to ride

Riders are here from all over the nation. If your restaurant is jammed with folks you don't recognize this weekend, that's why. Figure a couple thousand folks are in town.

I ran into Michael Ackley, an Ogden resident, who said for some silly reason he's riding in all three days of races. He admitted the idea lacks common sense, but what did that ever have to do with cycling?

"9 a.m., I'll be out there," at Antelope Island Wednesday morning, he said. "I'm first in line, so everyone follows me." Mike is in the 65-69 age group, which is where I'd be too if I lacked common sense.

The riders will do a day of time trials on Antelope Island Wednesday morning. Thursday and Friday they do road races starting at Snowbasin ski resort and circling Pineview Reservoir -- the older riders "only" ride 49 km loops, while the younger folk do 73 km.

Caren Werner, Ogden Convention and Visitors Bureau
shows off their commemorative T-shirt

Award ceremonies each night will be at Union Station.

Saturday, all day, they'll be riding criterion races around central Ogden, so the Farmer's Market will be shoved over around the Federal Building again.

Be sure and pick up the Convention and Visitor's Center special T-shirt. It's a lovely cycling design commemorating the  event with (uh-HUM!) a lovely historic building in the background that we all know and love.

Have fun. Ride boldly.

Note lovely historic building on T-shirt!