Turbo Pudding
It’s Thursday, so here’s a real story. In Dilly Delivers, every parcel on the day’s list comes with a kind: normal, fragile, heavy or urgent, and each one changes the walk. Real mail carriers in the United States once had a much simpler rule. If a parcel weighed more than four pounds, they couldn’t take it at all.
The picture at the top is Drizzle Dale, the farm country of the second chapter. Dilly is setting off from its branch post office, a little barn with a POST board and a duck on the weathervane, past an orchard and a row of beehives. Keep an eye on those bees.
Four pounds and no more
At the start of the 20th century, the law didn’t let the Post Office Department carry parcels heavier than four pounds. Bigger packages went with private express companies.
Then the mail came out to the farms. Rural free delivery began on October 1, 1896, in West Virginia. It became a permanent service on July 1, 1902. Before there was a standard mailbox, farmers put out whatever would hold a letter: lard pails, syrup cans, and old apple, soap and cigar boxes. In 1901, the Department asked for a standard metal box on a post, low enough for a carrier to reach without getting down.
Once letters came right to the gate, farmers wanted the rest too: food, dry goods, medicine and anything hard to find in the country.
The fight over parcels
Express companies and country stores fought the idea long and hard. Rural Americans, 54 percent of the country in 1910, wanted it just as much. While Congress argued, one express company paid its stockholders a large dividend, and public anger at those profits helped Congress decide.
The Act of August 24, 1912, authorized Parcel Post. A parcel could weigh up to eleven pounds and measure up to 72 inches in length and girth combined, that is, its length plus the distance around it.
Heavy, but just as far
With a heavy parcel on her back, Dilly can still jump just as far, but not as high: her hop tops out at 0.96 of a tile instead of 1.2, and her run at four tiles a second instead of four and a half. On the very first day, Pip gets a giant cheese and can hardly believe it: “You carried THIS all the way here?!”
In Drizzle Dale, the heavy parcel on the “Muddy Boots” day is a garden gnome for Clem the mole. Clem’s glasses don’t help much, and his best thank-you says so: “Is that you, Dilly? I can’t see a thing, but I can feel it’s perfect!”
An instant success
Parcel Post began on January 1, 1913, and it was an instant success: 300 million parcels went through the mail in the first six months. It gave a huge push to the big mail-order companies. That year, Sears handled five times as many orders as the year before.
A few weeks after the service began, Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son, James, to his grandmother, who lived a few miles away near Batavia, Ohio. He was just under the eleven-pound limit. A rural carrier named Vernon Lytle picked him up and took him in his mail wagon. The postage was fifteen cents, and the “parcel” was insured for $50.
That was against postal rules. At first, the only animals allowed in the mail were bees and bugs, so the bees on our cover would have qualified. Day-old chicks were added in 1918, and a few more “harmless live animals” in 1919. Children never made that list.
Fragile and urgent
A fragile parcel pays double for every knock. In Pudding Town on day one, the fragile parcel is a record for Bao, and the best ending sounds like this: “Not a scratch on it! Want to hear it? It goes ‘boop-boop-bee’!”
An urgent parcel is all about time. It pays a bigger bonus for hurrying, half again as much, but the bonus runs out sooner. In Drizzle Dale on the “Brook Hopping” day, the urgent one is a pumpkin pie for Pumpkin the piglet, who likes a delivery best with a little mud on it: “Perfect AND you brought some mud on your feet! Best delivery ever!”
Bigger and bigger boxes
Parcel Post kept growing. By August 1, 1931, a parcel could weigh 70 pounds and measure 100 inches. In 1983, one limit was set for every parcel mailed within the country: 70 pounds and 108 inches. In 1999, the size limit went up to 130 inches. The service changed its name too, to Standard Post in 2013 and to USPS Retail Ground in 2016.
A giant cheese, a garden gnome and a pumpkin pie would all fit with room to spare.
Come pick up a parcel
Chapter 1, Pudding Town, is free to play in your browser at dillydelivers.com. The full game, all six chapters, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Dilly Delivers page.
