I enjoyed a moment of nostalgic remembrance when reading Brad Swanson's guest column, "Take the handcuffs off the postal service," in the Opelika-Auburn News wherein he describes the delivery of a dozen live chicks through the mail.
My earliest memory of my father, the postmaster of Bourbonnais, Illinois, was on a crisp Sunday morning after church, in about 1950, when he took me along to load the trunk of our car with a half-dozen large flats, each containing from 50 to 100 live chicks, and driving throughout rural Kankakee County, delivering them to local farmers.
His service that day was outside his job description, but we knew all of the grateful farmers, and indeed, half of them were distant kin-folk.
More importantly as he explained to me with a twinkle in his eye, "Nothing stinks up a post office like dead chicks."
Michael Walsh
Auburn