My children look askance when I tell them I can remember when postage stamps were three cents each. But I can also remember when bread was 25 cents a loaf and regular gas was 27 cents a gallon. Ethyl, I believe, was 29 cents. When Lola and Carole and I piled into my Dad’s ’57 Chevrolet and went to the Longhorn Drive-In in Tahlequah, we bought a hamburger and Coke for much less than a dollar for each of us and a dollar’s worth of gas would take us to quite a few places.
But, getting back to stamps and their price back in the 1950s. If we hadn’t had a chance to get to the post office and buy stamps, we could leave the price of the stamps needed in the box for the rural mail carrier. My mother had this poem since living at Etta and that was way before my time. Here is the poem, The Rural Postman. I don’t know who wrote it but I’m sure it reflected the opinion of many an early-day rural mail carrier.
In the cold and blustery weather, when the frost is on the rail,
Would you love to face a blizzard with a half a ton of mail?
- In the biting blizzard weather when the snow comes to your knees,
Would you love to fish for pennies while your feet and fingers freeze?
When the gleaming snow is drifted underneath a foot of sleet,
Would you love to have the chillbains in your elbows and your feet?
When outdoors the wind is whistling and the air is full of snow,
Would you love to have a jitney and the blamed thing wouldn’t go?
Yes, I’d love the good old fireside, sipping coffee from a pail
But I have to buck the snowdrift ’cause the farmers want their mail
I don’t mind the frozen snowdrifts when my knees are still with cramps
If you keep the bloomin’ pennies, buy a quarter’s worth of stamps.
I get snow mixed in my whiskers and I get it in my socks,
But it never hurts my feelings like loose pennies in the box.
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