Mail Carrier Fun Facts
“While the Postal Service has no official motto, the popular belief that it does is a tribute to America's postal workers. The words above, thought to be the motto, are chiseled in gray granite over the entrance to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue and come from Book 8, Paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by Herodotus. During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers who served with great fidelity.”
Postal Service Mission and Motto, usps.com
We LOVE our mail carriers. The USPS has made some major changes in the last few years, and all the mail carriers we know are hanging in there like the champions that they are.
Want to know more awesomeness about mail carriers?
Over 650,000 people work for the United States Postal Service.
One Iowa route is 181.4 miles - the longest in the US. Mail carriers collectively traveled 1.2 billion miles in 2021.
Fifty mail carriers bike their route. The USPS also uses planes, hovercraft, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, subways, mules, and feet.
Walt Disney, Steve Carrell, Brittany Howard, and and John Prine were all mail carriers. Prine was known as "The Singing Mailman" on his Chicago-area route, which he covered from 1964 to 1969. The video for his last recorded song, “I Remember Everything,” features postcards that fans sent to his family following his death.
Both this guy and Kiki attended the University of Mississippi. One of them even has a degree.
William Faulkner was the Postmaster General in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. According to Bill Peschel, he “opened the post office on days when it suited him, and closed it when it didn’t, usually when he wanted to go hunting or over to the golf course.” After a couple of years of throwing away junk mail at his discretion and putting up mail on his schedule, he quit (before he could get fired), writing this: “As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.” His future included a Novel Prize for Literature and a postal stamp in his honor regardless.
Carriers frequently come in contact with dogs, and not all those interactions go well. Some carriers consider it the best part of their job. You can see reposts of mail carriers and their furry route friends at @postaldogs on Instagram.
Anne & Louise Jordan created the carrier at left with repurposed and found materials and modeled him after Raleigh mail carrier Bobby Turner. He's in their new children's book, Sunny the Sideloader.