The Secret Lives of Used Books (The Wolf That Fed Us, by Robert Lowry)
This little paperback copy of Robert Lowry’s story collection The Wolf That Fed Us (1949) once belonged to John Rose, of Providence, 9 R.I. Rose’s owner’s stamp is a good living example of the postal-code system that predates the one we’ve been using for nearly sixty years.
In 1943, the Post Office Department implemented a code-based sorting system to deal with a simultaneous increase in the amount of mail being processed and a decrease in the availability of clerks with experience hand sorting. The increase and decrease were attributable to America’s involvement in World War II, during which 20 percent of the population up and moved, whether because of the draft and the great surge in military enlistment or because of relocation to centers of war-related industry. Hence, there was more mail being sent and fewer experienced postal workers to sort it (because most of them were in uniform or had taken higher-paying industrial jobs).
The system put in place in 1943 introduced zones or districts within the country’s larger metropolitan areas, and each zone/district was indicated by a local code of one or two digits. Zone numbers were not unique to any given city. For example, there could be a Los Angeles 12, Calif., and a Milwaukee 12, Wis. (It’s unclear whether the comma typically fell after the code or before it.) Thus it was a patchwork system of local codes, though effective for its time.
In the years following the war, however, the country continued its uprooting and relocating. The population moved west, and suburbs grew in number and extent. A nationally coherent system was called for, with sorting done farther upstream in the process. So in 1963, the Post Office implemented its Zone Improvement Plan, which gave us the five-digit ZIP codes that are unique to each locality, whether a small town and its surrounding rural routes or a neighborhood within one of the nation’s bigger cities. The codes move across the map in regional series, starting with the 0 series of the New England states and New Jersey, moving through the 1 series of New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, and so on, ending with the 9 series along the West Coast (including Alaska and Hawaii). That same year, the Post Office introduced the standardized, two-letter state abbreviations.
Drafted in 1942, Robert Lowry saw action in North Africa and Italy. As the title of this story collection indicates, he took a dim view of American occupation forces. That his generation later got turned into plaster saints would have amazed him.
Lowry’s postwar years were a volatile mix of booze, bad marriages, and psychological struggles. These days, we might well wonder if he suffered from war-related PTSD.
