National Postal Museum

Collectors today prize something called first flight covers, envelopes that were actually flown on that October 19th trip, postmarked and often signed by Cy Caldwell himself.

The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum holds many of these in its collection, so does the Pan Am Historical Foundation.

If you're the kind of person who gets genuinely excited about a 97-year-old piece of mail, and if you're still listening to this episode, I'm guessing you might be, those covers are about as close as you can get to touching the actual event.

There's also something wonderfully appropriate about that.

Uh, your exhibits there are just fantastic, and there are a lot of postage stamps on display as well.

Yeah, they have a fantastic, uh, Smithsonian Postal Museum, and, you know, you may not...

As you say, you may not think a museum about mail is that interesting, but it's, you can't separate the Postal Service from the history of the country.

The expansion of the nation and the Postal Service are, you know, two sides of the same coin.

That distinction keeps the segment accurate while still, you know, explaining today's date.

So s- the S- uh, Smithsonian's National Postal Museum records, uh, another detail, shows National d- Defense postage stamps were released on October 16th to coincide with the registration date.

Even an ordinary item used to mail a letter became part of the co- country's, uh, preparation.

Um, and this was a use- uh, it's a useful image for radio listeners of a major national event, showing all the small routines of everyday life.

Along the way, she took a job in Chicago's Columbia College Fashion Study Collection, which introduced her to the world of historical dress and archive, and that's what led her to go back to school to turn her love of fashion and research into a career in archives.

She's now interning in museum and library collections, including doing an oral history project on postal workers' uniforms with the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

And we get into all of that in today's episode, what a day in the archive actually looks like, what makes a fashion piece belong in a museum collection versus on a vintage rack, plus what skills transfer from selling vintage into archival work, and what you have to unlearn, like resisting the desire to try all the cool things on.

That's a no-no in the archives.

But-

Yeah

... basically I was spend, I spent the summer interning, um, for the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, and I was brought on, uh, to work on a ... oral history workwear project, which in this, like, truest sense of the word, the workwear that I'm was interviewing people about was their uniforms.

So I was talking with past or current postal workers, uh, and just getting an oral documentation of, one, like, how they felt about their uniform, what it was like to wear it, and then kind of through those questions you learn a lot about just what it was like in their every day working in that industry.

What's even more shocking is that there was actually a lot of debate about whether there should even be a federal post office in the first place.

Here's Daniel Piazza of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum

with the story.

The Post Office Department was created in 1792 with an act that President Washington signed into law that year.

The Postal Service has to deliver to everybody, and that universality represents a lot of what the Post Office offers that private competitors don't.

And a terrific job on the production and storytelling by our own Madison Derricott.

And a special thanks to Daniel Piazza of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

And we learned that a lot hasn't changed in America about some of the early debates.