Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 22, 1993 TAG: 9308220203
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MICHAEL KILIAN CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
But it is fascinating, and also a terrific lot of fun.
Called the National Postal Museum, it occupies the central part of the old Washington City Post Office Building across from Washington's Union Station. And - notwithstanding jokes about how the museum's motionless statues are so authentic that you can't tell them from real postal workers - it's a place where one encounters a lively or intriguing little something at almost every turn.
In one nook, for example, there's a facsimile of a 16th-century postmark that suspiciously resembles a gallows - and with good reason. It was designed to remind the couriers of the period that the penalty for delaying the mail was death by hanging (this was well before the advent of the Postal Workers Union).
Another exhibit informs visitors that a woman once actually mailed her child (via rail post), and it was perfectly legal - until the rules were quickly changed.
Another, about the fabled Pony Express, explains how the federal government recruited orphans for this duty so the U.S. Post Office wouldn't have to mail letters of condolence to bereaved relatives should these swift and valiant horsemen encounter fatal misadventure.
Visitors also can learn, believably enough, how one of the first air-mail flights - traveling all of 18.5 miles between two towns in California - took two days to complete.
There's a "virtual reality"-type flight simulator that allows you to fly your own mail plane (they won't let you stay at the controls for two days, however), and other interactive computers that present such tasks as plotting the shortest mail delivery route between two points. As you might expect, it's almost never a straight line.
The museum, which opened Aug. 6 and shares its historic host building with the Labor Department and an actual post office, has three wonderfully restored early mail planes suspended from a ceiling, a genuine railway mail car such as figured in so many versions of the Great Train Robbery, plus two exact-replica stagecoaches. One is a deluxe version with glass windows that was used in New England, and the other is a crude, open-sided "mud wagon" that was the real stage coach of the Old West.
You can climb up and take a seat in the replicated "mud wagon," finding yourself facing three fellow passengers (lifelike sculpted figures) typical of the folk using the coaches in those days. One is a huge man with a cigar. Next to him is a tall, mysterious man who looks as if he might be a mass murderer. Wedged on the other side is a distraught 19th-century mother holding a crying child.
The feeling that it must have been a little crowded in those things increases when you realize that two other such interesting travelers would be on the seat next to you and yet three more would be wedged between everybody's knees on a bench seat set in the middle.
"And you'd ride like that, over hot, dusty, rocky, impossible terrain, 12 hours a day for two or more weeks," said National Postal Museum director James Bruns. "You can imagine the smell."
Indeed, this new museum is one of the most interesting to be found in the capital - which, given the many popular excitements and amazements of the nearby National Air and Space Museum, the dinosaur-dominated National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of American History, is saying a great deal.
"What we have here is an excellent example of the museum of the '90s," said Bruns, "with lots of interactive exhibits and dramatic displays that we hope will vividly tell what is a very interesting story. This isn't just a big stamp collection."
Though the Postal Service did maintain a small exhibition facility in an upstairs portion of the National Museum of American History (where Bruns' father, Franklin, was curator of postal history), it was little more than a stamp collection, begun with a donation of 10-cent Confederate stamps in 1886.
The new museum, filling what was the central atrium of the old Washington Post Office and reaching into large interior sections of the building, as well, is the nation's first major museum devoted to postal history and stamp collecting.
Under an agreement reached two years ago, the Postal Service donated the space and $15.4 million for the museum's construction, the latter sum augmented by gifts and endowments, and will pay $2 million of the facility's $3 million annual operating costs, with the Smithsonian contributing the rest.
There's a lot to operate. The new museum occupies 75,000 square feet of floor space and includes a movie theater, a museum shop and a stamp store. There's also a 6,000-square-foot research library. Counting what's in its vaults, the National Postal Museum houses no fewer than 16 million objects.
The museum is organized in five galleries, with the main or atrium gallery titled "Moving the Mail." Here there are three restored mail planes, including a 1911 Wiseman-Cooke flyer, whose design derived from the powered craft the Wright brothers had first flung into the air a mere eight years before. Also displayed here is a 1924 De Havilland open-cockpit biplane, one of the workhorses of early air mail, which carried 500 pounds of post, and a 1930s-era enclosed Stinson Reliant, which provided short-hop service before multi-engine passenger airliners took over.
Visitors entering the gallery's genuine railway mail car can try working as rail postal clerks, who were required to sort 600 pieces of mail in an hour. Visitors are timed to see if they can sort 10 pieces in 60 seconds.
There is, of course, a stamp collection containing a dazzling array of 55,000 domestic and foreign stamps, exhibited in the "Stamps and Stories" gallery. Among its high points are the 1934 "Whistler's Mother" (artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler actually called it "Arrangement in Gray and Black") Mother's Day stamp, the Hindenburg airmail stamp (issued before the airship crashed) and an extremely valuable 1918 "Inverted Jenny" airmail stamp. The last, issued to celebrate the inauguration of regular air mail service in the United States, bore a picture of a Jenny biplane. But the government printed a large number of them with the airplane upside-down. One sheet of 100 "Inverted Jennies" got into circulation, and individual stamps from it have sold for $20,000 or more.
Other oddities to be found in the National Postal Museum include: one of George Washington's postal bills, a "Pony Express Chewing Tobacco" spittoon, a Model T mail truck fitted with tractor treads and skis, a container for mailing dirty laundry, a container for mailing bees, a spiked paddle used for perforating mail to kill yellow fever germs in 1900, the letter carrier worn by the Cliff Clavin character on the TV show "Cheers," half a fake moustache used by a train robber, a tommy gun used by mail train guards, Charles Lindbergh's airmail pilot's application and a 1947 Monaco stamp that shows Franklin D. Roosevelt with six fingers on his left hand.
The National Postal Museum is at 2 Massachusetts Ave. NE, Washington, D.C. 20560. Admission is free; it's open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day (except Christmas). For general information, call (202) 357-2700. For group tours, call (202) 633-9380.
by CNB