Mailing May
by Michael O. Tunnell · first published 1997
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3HN commenters
2015–2025first – last mentioned
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In 1914, because her family cannot afford a train ticket to her grandmother's town, May gets mailed and rides the mail car on the train to see her grandmother.
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"Mailing May" (http://www.amazon.com/Mailing-May-Michael-O-Tunnell/dp/00644...) is a good (fictionalized) account of the story in the third paragraph, that of May Pierstorff. (By the way, the town was Grangeville,…
on “It was once socially acceptable to send children by post [pdf]” ↗Reminds me of a book, Mailing May[1], I read to my daughter and now my granddaughter. A true story of a family on a budget who sent their daughter to see grandma as mail cargo on a train. Cute story. https://www.amazon.com/Mailing-May-Michael-Tunnell/dp/006443...
on “A brief history of children sent through the mail (2016)” ↗See the childrens' book "Mailing May", which is (IIRC) based on a true story. They put postage stamps on a child and mailed her on a passenger train that also carried mail, because postage was cheaper than fare for a passenger. They bent…
on “The strangely successful history of people mailing themselves in boxes (2015)” ↗There's a children's book called "Mailing May". It's about a true incident, about a child being mailed. This was in the US, when mail was handled on trains, and the postage was cheaper than a passenger ticket. Her parents couldn't afford to send…
on “A man who posted himself to Australia (2015)” ↗…the iron curtain told to people from the other side of it sometimes sound equally crazy even without the generation gap. A cultural/societal gap is enough. [0] https://goodreads.com/book/show/1717855.Mailing_May
on “Back in the day, people had to cook a hard-boiled egg for a computer mouse (2020)” ↗