The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, June 29, 1902, Page 11

rougt the nearly two their piles e door, another ousand letters, incom there is no use They amount to and parcels trying to talk in pleces tons. Twenty-four hours of every twenty-four the work dling the mail goes on. Most of this is at the ferry station post- office, which is the real workshop of the San Franciscc department. The sorry- Jooking old' landmark on Battery street of han s the main office merely by courtesy, and because the general delivery and the boxes and the postmaster are there. Otherwise it is no more than a branch of- fice. When the railroad companies push their trucks oyer to the postoffice door and éump the bulging sacks on the floor, their responsibility ends. If it is the overland mail it is ready for the carriers, as all the letters for San Francisco have been separated by a clerk, who meets the west-bound train about 50 out of San Francisco. All"that re- miles mains to be done 1s to distribute bun- dles the 250 carriers at the various anch offices and sub-stations ufter the tters have been back-stamped to show éate and time of receipt at the office, and n ten minutes after the arrival of this mest important mail the carriers are handing it out to the people on thelir routes. With the other malls it is different. It takes sbout twenty minutes to put them through. There has been mno separation on the trains. When the sacks are opened the letters are distributed among clerks who sit be- hind cases divided according to the These clerks must know numbers of San Francisco for each let- stuck in the pigeonhole that rtain district. When this te the letters are tied in by the white mail cars companies to the branch stations, where the car- arrange them in the carrier districts st be for & & com rier for a few days and is route never varies. the unimpressionable- and paving things a i soon have his zigzag a huge gnature 10 and where's where and sitting before a tions he arranges his which he delivers it each covers is governed by mall to be delivered. Out town, where the houses d where the receipt of a nt, a carrier has much cover and makes but one or rips « day. Coming farther in, where ess is done and letters are an every- day occurrence, the districts are smaller and the trips more fregueat. In such great bulldings as the Mills and Parrott blocks one carrier cannot handle all the FHE SUNDAY CALL, AT /AN, A\ :/’l i‘ ¢ given to tral districis the cen deliveries. looks simple enough, has worn itself into s becauss ich nice me day r day until the hundreds of thousands tters heap into uncountable millions, r's volume increasing visi division of the another class to deal with hich goes direct to the car- the mail that has no street s for about 20 per cent of all the in. attention these are entitled to is put in a rack behind the general »w in the main office on Bat held there until called for, does not happen within the time specified on the envelope, returned to sender if he has had the good sense to put his name on a corner of the envelope. Or if there is no name and no instruc- tions as to time of return they eould after thirty days be sent to the dead letter of- fice. But, no, Uncle Sam is pleased to go to more than two cents’ worth of trouble o find the owner of a letter. If it has street address a letter does ot once to the general delivery but to a cor- ner of the Battery-street postoffice where, day after day, a corps of women clerks pora over the city directory tr: to fit addresses to the names on the en- velopes. The postoffi s its directories made to order, in eight sections, with many blank pages after each printed page, where the clerks note changes in addre and add new names; and before letters without street and number are consigned to general delivery they are sent to addresses that may be found in the directory under the same name, going perhaps to several carriers before they are given up as a bad job and left to their fate in the general delivery pile. So much for the city division, which handles barely half the malil that passes through the postoffice. Working side by side with these busy men, who are always running on schedulg time, are the men of the malling divistoh. Thelr work begins on the long table with its ever-changing, never-ending stream of letters, dumped helter-skelter from bags and baskets. Here the facers stand, straightening the jumble into stacks all facing the same way, for the next thing that happens to the letters is the canceling of stamps and they must all be right side up with care to run through the canceling machine, which works at the rate of some unbe- lievable thousands an hour. And how the man who stands there feeding them in must swear at the igno- rant and the silly who do not put their stamps at the upper right hand corner! Only stamps that are in the proper place are canceled, and for the others the ma- chine must be stopped and the stamp hand-canceled, for Uncle Sam is seriously opposed to having stamps do double duty, and there are people whose consciences will let them cut uncanceled stamps from letters and use them again. By means of the canceling machine a check is put upon all letters, showing whether they have been dropped in malil boxes or in the postoffice. This is useful in case of complaints from business men who claim that their mail is not handled promptly. If, for instance, a man says his mail is sent to the office by messen- ger, it can soon be learned whether the boy took it there or got tired and dropped it in the nearest mail box. A letter *“C" on the canceling stamp marks the letters collected from mail boxes, while a *“D” marks the drop letters mailed at the post- office. From the canceling machine the letters g0 to clerks who make the first division of them. Standing before cases with from a hundred to nearly two hundred pigeonholes, these men throw letters like they were dealing out cards. In the first general division the separation is made for a few of the largest cities in the coun- try, States in groups, forelgn mail that ®oes by way of New York and San Fran- > b RS Y FLgcines TABLE affie Bz Berthall. e gether: and for cases where only the street and number are given, a directory is used showing all the streets in all the cities and towns in the country, and just how the numbers run on each street. This is the work of the “nixie’” man. Now this “nixie” man comes to be a genius at guessing. The work he has to do is like trying to figure out puzzle pic- tures which read, “Aunt Mary is going to meet papa; find papa,” or “Willie has lost To any one “nixie” man, the meaning of ad- dresses on certain letters is hidden as ab- solutely as papa and Willle’s dog In the and it is just as plain after you have been told. o PRrCa TI0N OfF OuT&OING cisco forelgn, and the letters for san Francisco, which are about thirty per cent of the entire number entered here. Then comes a finer division, with direct packages for all towns in California that get more than fifty letters a day, while those for smaller towns are routed for their several trains and in the order in which they are handled by the rallway postal clerks; for the more important citles of other States and for the dis- tributing postoffices of the Pacific forelgn countries. These men come to be walking geog- raphies. They must know the name of every hamlet from the north pole to the south, and from Dan to Beersheba and back again. They must be as famillar with Novovskresressensk, Alexandrovs- kolepasselenie, Ecaterinonikolsk and Ghy- ighinskole as they are with Sacramento and Oakland. They must know through which port of foreign countries the malil for the hun- dreds of interlor towns enter, and they must know it without stopping to think. To prove how well they know all these things, each man is brought to the super- intendent’s office three or four times a year and given a case examination, which means that he is put in a small room by himself, with a glass door so the super- intendent can keep an eye on him while he works, and with a small case divided like the regular working cases outside, and something like two thousand cards bear- ing the names of postoffices, he makes a distribution of the cardg. His time is kept and his credits are baled upon this and the number of errors he makes. There are men who can throw every card in its place and at the rate of from fifty to six- ty-five a minute, which accounts for the fact that not more than one letter in six thousand goes astray from this office. After the last distribution the letters are ready to be tled in packs, with a slip con- taining the name of the distributing clerk, put in pouches, which are locked and sent by the truckful to the great platform in the rear, where the dispatcher records each sack and sends it off to the proper train. It takes a letter just ten minutes 'to make the trip from the basket that catches “drops” to the trucks that are delivered to railroad companies five min- utes before train time. One of the distributing cases {s devoted entirely to the ships of the navy and the various regiments now in active service in the Philippines. Their whereabouts is known at all times by advices from Wash- ington, and their mail is routed accord- ingly. The little slip that goes with each pack- age of letters serves as a check on each man’'s work. If a mistake has been made, the railway postal clerk returns the let- ter with the slip and—well, it isn’t a good thing to have too many slips come back on you. But postal clerks are not the only peo- ple who make mistakes. On an average, five hundred letters a day are entered at the Ban Francisco postoffice with insuf- ficlent or incorrect address. These must be caught by the distribut- ing clerks as they throw the letters into the cases. In case of insufficlent address, it is easy efiough, but a man has to be thinking about what he is doing to catch mistakes. Where there is a mistake in the adress, if the sender’s name is on the envelope, the letter could be returned to him for correction; otherwise, it might be sent to the dead letter office, But Uncle Sam does not do business that way. Again, he takes a paternal in- terest in giving quick servics, and no stone 1s left unturned to figure out the correct destination of the letter. ‘When a letter reads 527 Market street, Oakland,” or “Chicago, Missouri,” any- body but a blind man would know what it meant; but when an absent-minded somebody has stopped after writing the street number and name of the street, or has put down town and county, but no State, there is work for one In the post- office. The way this thing Is done is by means of directorfes. Uncle Sam has CAanNCELING ) S rane, 40,300 A AOUR . every concelvable kind of directory. If a letter has town and county, but no State, a @arch fs made through an index ‘that shows all the towns and counties of all the States until the two are found to- L] clerk Sanaza office any “San Jos ' but it a score more « ” awd that neral Gachson® mean to fig: that “A: with t” not crossed, Tehama County, California. That address is very common in mail [ that comes from the ‘Azores, as is this: Amo dore, Amo dorecountealifornia, which plainly means Amador, Amador County, California. It was mere chance that a letter ad- ) dressed to Mrs. James Quick, Nevads County, California, found its owner. The “nixie” man remembered reading the woman’s advertisement in the paper and was able to supply the address. Not loug ago the San Francisco “nixie™ clerk had to figure on this: Sranowng Pan Tomas Migacz Opez, Kalifornia, Ps, Waschston Katy, Nor Amriga. The “Kal- ifornia” being conspicuous on the enve- lope had brought the letter to this of- fice, whereas it was intended for a man in the town of California, Wasbington County, Pennsylvania. A fair percentage of the “nixie” man's troubles come from the 20,000 letters that come into the San Francisco office daily for distribution to points for which this 1s the distributin, but he is the puzzle man re coast division. Another class of people that postoffice rks do not love is the ny fellow, vho gets joky when he addresses letters. Here is a sample of him One charley Jones, a webfoot serub, To whom this letter wants to go, Is chopping cordwood for his grub In Silver C laho Then the ain-letter flend. It 1s now four Miss Audrey Grif- fir of Hurt 7., started a chain-letter ed stamps. Her p: was charitable. A rich man in Hurt ad told her If she would 1,000,000 canceled stamps he would children’s ward in a hospita: there, which at that timé had no accom- modations for children. No doubt the poor woman Is sorry now, the postal y during the to Miss | now the San : flice forwards to her by each steamer from five to seven sacks of mall, or from 3500 to 5000 letters, all of whien thick and hea with stamps in- d. It been estimated that in the ates alone the postage on letters ss Griffin amounts to from to 340 while from other countries it is even more. Nobody would care very much about the volume of this mail if the postage were fully paid. But it is not, and there's A large portion of it carries N Miss Grifin would be bankrupt if she attempted to pay the postage due on all the cartloads of mail she receives, and by the last steamer ten sacks of it were returned to the San Francisco office. She might give Instrue- tions to have it held for postage, but the nstructions would apply only to that ich bears the co in four years’ time, with thousands of dif- ferent persc ead and writing the names the ad has undergone so many metamorphoses that only a “nixie’” man could guess that “Miss Trefty, Ma- logny Mills, N. S. W.,” was meant for Miss Griffin of Hurtsville. A few of the hundreds of v Mak Mildo, ations o ly Hurtsville are Malsue Mills, Mayron Mills, St. Hermits Monta, , Aus ding source of an- noyanece person who believes that because a paper wrapper has a l-cent cent will carry any t of newspapers, from an ounce to t, and the soomer peo- is do not get the ma Only_ first class forwarded without being tully day basketfuls of sec- s matter are destroyed fiice. Only where 1 value is a re- the addresses ward. rs and parcels is he handling of ept in the case the daily which require little attention f postoffice clerks: newspaper in branch_postoffice. ive the machines they ail bags furnished by nd many of these as opened at the is necessary is to them on the dis- y much aper: mv station. All that them and put ferry weigh HROWIN G FPRFPERS NG PaRCELS INTe Ao MNES patcher’s record, which means a great saving in time and clerk hire. But Uncle Sam's a pretty good fellow after all. and no one could begrudge him this much help in the stupendous task of handling the mail.