Mailing May
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.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
3people
2015–2025years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 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...
- "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, ID, not Graneville.)
- Your weekend project was probably very creative but not "you're pulling my leg, this can't be for real".
Technology is complicated and only getting more so. Even a tech savvy person can be surprised by something new in tech. Some techniques that can be used to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped system could still sound crazy or leave you surprised. But it's a different kind of surprise, not that you can't believe it's real, more that you can't believe someone thought of using it that way, or that tech evolved to the point the thing became possible.
I was thinking more of stories like this one [0]. Sounded exactly like a story used to bamboozle young'uns until I realized it's actually true. Stories from behind 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.
- 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 the rules that allowed mailing live chicks to cover her.
Tangentially related: Duchesne, Utah, wanted to build a railroad station, in the hopes of attracting a railroad. They mailed the bricks for the station to the town, because mail was cheaper than freight rates on wagons.
- 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 her the normal way.
