The Flat Stanley Project was started in 1995 by Dale Hubert, a third grade school teacher in London, Ontario, Canada. It is meant to facilitate letter-writing by schoolchildren to each other as they document where Flat Stanley has accompanied them. Dale Hubert received the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2001 for the Flat Stanley Project.
The Project provides an opportunity for students to make connections with students of other member schools who have signed up with the project. Students begin by reading the book and becoming acquainted with the story. They create paper "Flat Stanleys" (representative drawings of the Stanley Lambchop character) and keep a journal for a few days, documenting the places and activities in which Flat Stanley is involved. Each student's Flat Stanley and its respective journal are mailed to other people who are asked to treat the figure as a visiting guest and add to his journal, then return them both after a period of time. The project has many similarities to the traveling gnome prank except, of course, for the Flat Stanley Project's focus on literacy.
Students may find it fun to plot Flat Stanley's travels on maps and share the contents of the journal. Often, a Flat Stanley returns with a photo or postcard from his visit. Some teachers prefer to use e-mail for its quicker travel time.
In 2005, more than 6,500 classes from 48 countries took part in the Flat Stanley Project.
The project was featured in a 2004 episode of the animated TV series King of the Hill, in which Nancy Gribble receives a Flat Stanley in the mail. Peggy Hill and Luanne Platter photograph it in a number of dangerous situations, resulting in the school's Flat Stanley Project being cancelled.
In early 2010, Darren Haas, a huge Flat Stanley advocate and applications architect, approached Dale Hubert with the idea of turning the Flat Stanley Project concept into an app for the iPhone.
Also in 2010, fans of the baseball team the St. Louis Cardinals were asked (via the team website) to petition US President Barack Obama to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial. A "Flat Stan" downloadable cutout figure was made available to encourage Cardinals fans to take a photo with Musial's caricature and send them in as petitions.
W. Levi Clough, rural mail carrier, Queen Annes County, Maryland, saw the red flag up on the Enoch Sloan box. He stopped his horse at the box, opened it, and took out an alarm clock, with a note attached. The note read: "Pa's watch stopped. Will you please set our clock?"
It would appear that delivering mail to 30,000,000 people would be a big enough job for our 32,546 rural mail carriers without the added duty of setting clocks. But to the families lined up along the thousands of miles of rural routes in this country, the mail carrier is just another neighbor, willing and glad to help out with little favors.
The carriers themselves feel the same way about it. The service has a fine tradition of helpfulness and neighborliness back of it, built up during its relatively short life. The rural mail delivery service will observe its fifty-eighth birthday this year.
It all started back in the middle 1880's when a pert little farmer's wife got to her feet in a Grange meet- ing out in the Grand Prairie region of our Midwest and complained bitterly about having to drive eight miles over bad roads for the mail. “People in the cities have their mail delivered to them," she said. "Are they any better than we are; why can't we have a rural free delivery?"
The idea swept the country like a fire on the Grand Prairie. Politicians were quick to see its virtue as a rural vote getter. By 1891 there was sufficient pressure back of the idea to induce Postmaster General Wanamaker to suggest a bill in Congress to create such a service. The bill failed, but the next year Congress appropriated $10,000 for an experimental rural delivery route. Mr. Wanamaker was annoyed at the stingy appropriation and stated that it was inadequate for a full exploitation of even an experimental route. The appropriation was on an annual basis and by 1896 enough had accumulated to justify a start.
On June 9, 1896, the first R.F.D. route was started at Charles Town, West Virginia, and a little later in the same year two more routes were established in the same state. The service spread like the green bay tree. At its peak there were 45,382 routes serving the rural areas.
The name, Rural Free Delivery, is a misnomer, and although it was used officially for a time, the “free” was dropped in 1903, no one knows why. The official designation now is simply Rural Delivery. It is not now, and never was free.
Rural mail carriers are a race apart. Theirs is a lonely life. They go their appointed rounds, day after day over the same routes, with no company but their thoughts. They watch the snows of winter melt off the hillsides, the tender green of spring appear, merging into the lush summer and then into the painted autumn. They get to know every stick and stone and puddle along their piece of country highway. Some of the people along their routes remain only names on the mailboxes; others, as lonely as they, become friends and neighbors, coming to the end of the lane in sunbonnet and apron, to exchange a few words with the outside world. They see children grow up and become fathers and mothers and then grand- parents. From the very nature of their duties they become helpful neighbors, and their chores stretch beyond their official duties of carrying the mail, making out money orders, selling stamps.
W. Levi Clough, who set the clock, has been carrying the mail over the same route for forty-seven years. His total mileage would reach twenty times around the earth. He wore out more horses and buggies than he can remember, and nine automobiles. For thirteen years after he started his route in 1916 he drove a horse. Sometimes, when the bottom fell out of the dirt roads in winter, he rode horseback, taking short cuts across the fields. A runaway horse once dumped him, with all his mail, into a wet ditch. He once wrote a letter for an illiterate farmhand to his best girl. The letter, a proposal of marriage, was so convincing she said yes.
The Post Office Department learned very early that it could not restrict the extracurricular activities of its mail carriers. There are a few things they cannot do they cannot solicit on their routes, and they cannot make deliveries for business firms. But there is nothing in the regulations to prevent them from matching a spool of thread for a patron or stopping at the blacksmith shop for a sharpened plowshare. They have delivered babies, put out fires, helped round up strayed livestock, taken splinters out of fingers. Walter Hansen, of Vermont, found this note in a box: "Will you please stir my apple butter. I'm taking Lafe his dinner."
The telephone, radio, and daily paper have not seriously threatened to displace the mail carrier as purveyor of news, rumor, and neighborhood gossip.
The hazards of driving more than a million miles would seem to be a strain on the law of averages. Yet John Stansbury, who has carried the mail in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana, for thirty-two years, has never had an accident-"never even bumped into anyone," he says. The carriers have a remarkable safety record.
The department permits carriers to operate side- line businesses as long as they do not interfere with the delivery of the mail. Stansbury has a little farm, gets up at four o'clock, feeds his stock, and goes to the post office to sort his mail. He says that he always looks forward to his daily thirty-mile drive, for like all carriers he believes the people along his route are the best. "Why," he says, "I'm always finding a bunch of new onions or a length of sausage at butchering time, or a cup of hot coffee on the cold days."
If a carrier wants to stop and chat, there's nothing in the regulations to prevent it. He is not confined to a time schedule, but is expected to cover his route regardless of storm or heat or cold or gloom of night. If he finds a bridge out, he is permitted to take alternate roads, but otherwise he cannot take short cuts even though he has no mail to deliver.
When the service was started in the late nineties the routes were shorter than they are now. Up to the early twenties routes were laid out on the basis of the distance a cavalry horse could walk in eight hours. As automobiles replaced the horse, the length of routes has been increased. Very often when a carrier retires, his route is combined with another. The longest route today, 104.1 miles, is out of Edinsburg, Texas. The shortest is out of Robbin, Illinois, and is 6.25 miles in length. The standard route is 30 miles, and it is on this length that the basic salary is computed. The first carrier was paid $200 per year. Through the years the salary has been gradually in- creased. Today the maximum salary a carrier can draw is between $4,000 and $5,000, depending on the length of service, length of route, and the population served. He furnishes his own car, but is paid depreciation and maintenance. Carriers are required to retire at the age of seventy. A few reach this age with fifty years of service behind them. These veterans are regarded as the royal family among carriers.
A carrier is chosen from the area he will serve. When a vacancy occurs, a Civil Service examination is held and the highest man, usually, gets the appointment. The qualifications are simple—a citizen, must know postal rates and regulations, be able to read No. 4 print at fourteen inches, be sound of wind and limb. Both sexes are eligible, but the calling has scant appeal for women. Out of the 32,000-odd carriers, only 348 are women.
"Miss Lutie" Mayfield, Morely, Missouri, retired last year on her annuity at the age of seventy, one of the few women carriers to achieve that distinction. She became a carrier after the death in France of her husband in the First World War. She had previously been a schoolteacher.
Rural mail has been delivered from about every sort of contrivance that moves-buggy, motorcycle, sled, sleigh, wagon, bicycle, automobile, by foot, and from the back of a mule. About the turn of the century the Post Office Department authorized a standard delivery wagon, a boxlike affair, painted white, with the inscription, U.S. MAIL, and the route number. The mail was filed in a slotted shelf in front of the driver. The reins came through slits above the shelf. It could be closed tightly against the elements, but the windshield could be dropped and the sliding doors opened in pleasant weather. During the winter the carrier usually placed a lighted kerosene lantern between his legs to keep him warm. His lunch reposed under the seat. In those days the more elegant carriers wore a uniform, somewhat reminiscent of what was worn by the boys in blue during the Civil War. It was a trifle stuffy for hot July and August days, and was gradually discontinued.
The standard mail "hack" in turn gave way to the automobile. Fred. J. McKeown, Giddings, Texas, started carrying the mail on pony back in 1903 and retired in 1953 after fifty years of service. He acquired a two-wheel cart which he used when the Texas roads dried out. "During the winter rains I often had to swim my pony across streams and if I wasn't careful he could drop into a mud hole."
He thought a Model T Ford could get around as the roads improved, and he bought one in 1917. But he had to be pulled out of so many mud holes by friendly farmers that he went back to his pony for a few years more.
He passes daily the one-room schoolhouse which he attended, and four of his schoolmates are on his route. In the early days, before telephones were common, he was often asked to send the doctor after he got back in town. He still does a brisk business toting packages from town and to neighbors.
The old-time mail carrier periodically had a very knotty problem-what to do with his horse once he was through with him. A horse which had been used for any length of time by a mail carrier was ruined forever after as a driving animal. He wanted to stop at every mailbox along the road, and what was more frustrating, slowed up as soon as he saw one; he was reluctant to travel any road other than his old mail route. No one ever got anywhere on time with an old R.F.D. horse. The daily twenty to thirty miles of an average route soon took the ginger out of a horse, but he was still good as a family horse long after he was unfit for a mail route. Gypsies or traders usually bought the mail horses, at a very low price, and ped- dled them to suckers in strange neighborhoods.
A growing number of special cars are being made for the rural mail carrier. These have a right-hand drive which permits reaching the mailbox without sliding across the seat. They are equipped for easy and convenient storage of mail and packages.
When parcel post came along, the duties of the carriers were more than doubled. Packages up to seventy pounds were handled. The Post Office Department adopted a larger mailbox, capable of hand- ling the larger packages, and asked the carriers to push them. However, there are still many small rural boxes. When the carrier has a package larger than the box will accommodate, he may deliver it directly, if it is convenient. Otherwise, he leaves a note asking the patron to call at the post office for it, or to meet him at the box the next day. He cannot leave it outside. A carrier dare not take mail from a home which is quarantined. He must deliver a special delivery letter up to half a mile off his route. The department requests that he not leave his mail out of his sight, although it is doubtful if there would be a prosecution should a carrier be invited into a home for a chicken dinner.
A carrier gets 13 days' vacation a year for less than 3 years' service, 20 days up to 15 years' service, and 26 days after that. He is allowed 13 days' sick leave per year with pay.
Rural mail delivery blankets the country today. There is scarcely a family, however isolated, that doesn't get its mail delivered regularly. Some isolated mountain communities are still served by pony ex- press. In the bayous of the South, where there are no roads, the mail is sometimes delivered by boat. Claude Underwood is one of the carriers down there. His route, in Baldwin County, Alabama, is served entirely by boat. He starts at Magnolia Springs, going through Weeks Bay and up the Fish River. He moves from one side of the river to another in his six-cylinder boat, "Jeanetta," stopping at docks, boathouses, and at boxes nailed on trees. He sometimes has to dodge alligators, and keeps an eye open for snakes. His route is a little over twenty-two miles long, with sixty- eight families.
Rural carriers have an exuberant national organization, The National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, with headquarters in Washington. Their patriotism takes no back seat, even to the D.A.R., and they have a zealous pride in their organization and membership. Each state has its own tight little association. The carriers have a death benefit association, the Rural Carriers' Provident Guild, and a social organization known as the Retired and Pioneer Carriers' Club.
In Washington the politicians come and go, but the rural mail carrier, oblivious to everything except the prompt and regular delivery of his mail, goes his appointed way. There are few who would challenge the statement that no government worker does a better job of serving the citizen.
Your dolls can send a lovely flower postcard to their family and friends through the Dolly Mail this summer.This set includes: old roses, crocus, daisies, corn flowers, carnations, heliotrope, mums, rhododendron, verbena, apple blossoms, pansies and hyacinth.
For personal use only. Do not resale or redistribute.
Now you can craft a paper doll postman to help deliver all of those holiday packages and letters your dolls will be sending and receiving through the dolly mail! A postman like the one pictured below would have worn a navy or grey suit. His uniform would might have been trimmed with gold braid.
This mechanical paper doll will need to have it's parts attached with brads.
These vintage postcards where once sent through the mail to parents and friends from Girl Scout campers. The black and white smaller versions shown here for your dolls are original designs sold for 10 cents (pack of 6) through mail-order. The color versions were a bit more expensive and illustrate the early Brownie and Girl Scout promises and laws.
In 1922 little girls could order these Girl Scout Post Cards, a set of 6 for only 10 cents!
A vintage postcard of early Brownie Promise.
The Brownie Scout Promise
I promise to do my best To love God and my country, To help other people every day, especially those at home.
Vintage postcard of early Girl Scout Laws.
Laws
I A Girl Scout's honor is to be trusted.
II A Girl Scout is loyal.
III A Girl Scout's duty is to be useful and to help others.
IV A Girl Scout is a friend to all and a sister to every other Girl Scout.
V A Girl Scout is courteous.
VI A Girl Scout is a friend to animals.
VII A Girl Scout obeys orders.
VIII A Girl Scout is cheerful.
IX A Girl Scout is thrifty.
X A Girl Scout is clean in thought, word, and deed.
Vintage postcard of an early Girl Scout Pledge: The Girl Scout Promise: On my honor, I will try: To do my duty to God and my country, To help other people at all times, To obey the Girl Scout Laws.
The following vintage Birthday cards are for your 18" dolls to send via the dolly post office. Cut and paste them to card stock to make doll postcards or glue them to the front of mini greeting cards and then wright a message inside for your Best Birthday Wishes.
The postcards above range from 1890s through the 1950's. Give your American Girl doll a card from her own era if you'd like...
Little girls and their dolls may print out these 18" doll size Christmas greeting cards for free this holiday season. There are many themes here: nutcrackers, trees, rocking horse, ribbon candy, pretty packages, sugar plums, bells and a sock snowman. Each card is designed with both a front and a back side. Cut along the black lines but fold each card in half wherever you see a line between the picture and the website information. Write a Christmas message to your doll's friends and then send the card off in the dolly mail!
Christmas cards for dolls. Miniature doll greeting cards.
The following doll sized postcards cover the historical topic of WWI. Originally these tiny greetings were pasted across the envelopes of letters to seal them with a bit of color. They are very old, but I have cleaned them for this new use.
Download, print and paste these WWI postcard greetings on top of heavy cardstock.
Cut them out carefully and then help your doll to write a message of encouragement to their pretend fathers and mothers fighting in a war.
Send a holiday greeting to all of your doll's
friends and family through the dolly mail! These old-fashioned postcards
include:mums, turkeys, pilgrims, pumpkins, corn, wish bones, fall leaves, apples etc...
Printables at our blog are not to be redistributed from any other online collection or sold for profit. They are the property of kathy grimm and are for personal home use only.
Your
doll can send a Happy Halloween message to all of their
friends and family through the dolly post! These vintage, reproductions
include: carved vegetables, corn, pumpkins, jack-o-lanterns, straw hats, children in costume, witchy brooms, tub of apples, black cats, scarecrows, party table, lighted candle, and a large hoot owl!
Printables at our blog are not to be redistributed from any other online collection or sold for profit. They are the property of kathy grimm and are for personal home use only.
Above you can see our doll's wrapped packages with labels ready to mail for the holidays. We have a printable below of mailing labels in red and navy: Glass Handle With Care, Rush, C. O. D., Special Delivery, Handle With Care and Prepaid. Make sure to paste labels on those fragile gifts so that everything arrives on time and in good condition through the Dolly Post!
Our printable shipping labels for dollplay and personal crafts only.
Your doll can
send a Happy St. Valentine's Day message to all of their
friends and family through the dolly post! These vintage, reproduction postcards
include: angels, hearts, roses, violets, charming young children, Victorian ladies, doves and even a kiss!
Printables at our blog are not to be redistributed from any other online collection or sold
for profit. They are the property of kathy grimm and are for personal home use only.
Little valentine messages to include on the back of your cards:
Your doll can send a Happy St. Patrick's Day message to all of their
friends and family through the dolly post! These vintage, reproductions
include: clover, shamrocks, clergy, ladies, spinning wheel, leprechauns, harps, flags, pennants, frogs, top hats, planets and even Blarney Castle!
Printables at our blog are not to be redistributed from any other online collection or sold
for profit. They are the property of kathy grimm and are for personal home use only.
Now your doll can send a Happy New Year's message to all of their friends and family through the dolly post! These vintage, reproductions include: Father Time, Baby New Year, clocks, hour glasses, bells, a moon, toasts and fireworks.
Printables at our blog are not to be redistributed from any other online collection or sold
for profit. They are the property of kathy grimm and are for personal home use only.
Now your dolls can send a charming, nostalgic postcard through the dolly mailbox to any one of her friends or family this coming year. Choose from a variety of Easter themes like: chicks, Easter bunnies, crosses, prayer, lilies, church, lambs, choir and butterflies. Tell someone special your doll is thinking of them!
Printables at our blog are not to be redistributed from any other online collection or sold
for profit. They are the property of kathy grimm and are for personal home use only.
Your dolls can send these lovely old-fashioned Christmas postcards to their family and friends this Christmas through the Dolly Post. There are many topics sure to please: Santa, angels, baby Jesus, Christmas bells, holly, pine branches, candles, stockings etc...
Don't forget to print an address and write a festive message on the back!
Printables at our blog are not to be redistributed from any other online collection or sold
for profit. They are the property of kathy grimm and are for personal home use only.
