A Nostalgic Look at “Snail Mail”
When Ray and I returned from our walk Saturday night, we stopped at the mailbox. Inside was a welcome sight, a white envelope addressed to me and written by hand in cursive. I was eager to see what was inside: an invitation to a baby shower for a young woman who spent several years enthralling us with her performances in the Homeschool Dramatic Society. I was delighted.
I miss the days when mailboxes contained long letters like those my friends and I wrote to each other when we were in college and the ones Ray and I wrote to each other during the long semester just before we got married when he was in Kentucky and I in Tennessee. I miss the postcard days, too. “Back in the day” we scribbled short messages on postcards when we went on vacation to let friends and family know that we were thinking about them.
Our written communication now is fast and temporary. I wonder what future historians will do when they don’t have letters like those John Adams exchanged with his wife Abigail during their long absences and with his friend Thomas Jefferson after they restored their friendship.
Our children wrote letters when we were homeschooling, and I counted the time they spent writing them as part of their English credit. Ray and I still send postcards, but only to our grandchildren. We can almost always find them for sale, so I guess we are not alone.
I feel nostalgic about the whole letter writing/letter receiving/pretty stamps/post office system. My family had two postal workers. My Great Uncle Jack (my Daddy Leland’s brother) was a big presence in my life and lived until I was 25 years old. He carried mail for 35 years. In the beginning, he delivered mail by horse and buggy. After carrying mail and studying law at the same time, Uncle Jack began his legal practice; but he kept on carrying the mail, going to his office after his mail was delivered. Uncle Jack stopped carrying mail when I was two years old, but my Uncle Preston was a rural mail carrier all through my growing up and after until he retired. I got a kick out of seeing him at the Ashland City post office.
I look forward to telling you later this week about an exhibit Ray and I recently saw at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. The Frist is housed in what was once Nashville’s main post office. I read online that long lines of last-minute tax filers used to form at the post office on April 15 with postal workers sometimes coming out to the cars on the street to take the returns. I don’t remember Daddy or Mother handing our return to a postal worker on the street, but I do remember us being in the long line of cars in front of the building to drop ours off one April 15.
Today the museum occupies the two upper floors, but the lower level is still a working post office. Needing to mail a package when we were there last Friday, we went inside the post office first. I took these photos to share with you.
The Art Deco design of the building, completed in 1934, and its furnishings are spectacular from floor to ceiling. Ray and I passed this exterior aluminum grillwork as we walked toward the post office entrance.
At one end of the long room where patrons stand at beautiful tables to place stamps on their letters is a photo of the building under construction. Notice the beautiful aluminum table. I am pretty sure that the top is marble.
A picture of the almost completed structure is at the other end of the room . . .
. . . and here is the view from one end to the other. Notice the curved ceiling. Ray said it looks like the interior of a train. Union Station is next door.
This view shows the giant compass on the floor near the entrance.
Aluminum grillwork divides a portion of the long room from the room beside it where patrons purchase postage from postal workers. This is a detail from that grillwork.
These posters of stamps commemorating the Tennessee state capitol (1996) . . .
. . . and Music City’s country music legend Roy Acuff (2003) are modern decorations.
In 1999 the post office added this mural by artist Sharon Rusch Shaver in the room where patrons purchase postage.
The mural connects events at Union Station with the post office. Only seven years after the post office was completed, Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. Congress made a declaration of war. The artist wanted to remind people of that time when people made sacrifices for their country and for future generations. She asks those who see the mural to feel the emotion in the images as a reminder that our nation is only as great as its people. Let’s take a somewhat closer view.
Shaver found photos at the Tennessee State Archives that depicted emotional goodbyes as trains left Union Station to carry away the soldier boys. She painted images based on those photos and framed them with elements of the Art Deco decorations of the post office. In her description beside the mural, the artist noted that the only link these soldiers and their families had were the letters they could send and receive through the Nashville post office.
Letters played an essential role in the instruction for the early Christians, and these letters continue to teach us today. Most of the books of the New Testament are letters God inspired and instructed to be sent to churches and individuals.
So then, brethren, stand firm
and hold to the traditions
which you were taught,
whether by word of mouth
or by letter from us.
2 Thessalonians 2:15
I love the way God used the symbolism of a letter to encourage the Christians at Corinth. I pray that you may train your children to be the kind of letter that those Christians were.
You are our letter, written in our hearts,
known and read by all men;
being manifested that you are a letter of Christ,
cared for by us, written not with ink
but with the Spirit of the living God,
not on tablets of stone
but on tablets of human hearts.
2 Corinthians 3:2-3