With a few lovely minutes to spare this weekend, I flipped through our satellite channels and happened onto a show called the Carbonaro Effect. It’s a hidden camera magic television show where this guy, Michael Carbonaro, pranks unsuspecting people with outrageous and clever tricks like disappearing goldfish in a pet store to moving skeletons on an archaeological dig to time travel at a Nikola Tesla museum and something called drone care.
In the drone care skit, a dad (Carbonaro) asked a lady walking in an Atlanta park if she’d take a photo of him and his son (a young actor) before he shipped him off in a large box via drone. The boy was to be shipped to his mother who was then going to take him to Canada with her.
The lady was reluctant yet curious about the whole mailing a kid thing and asked a lot of questions. The dad even gave the kid a passport to put in his pocket. At the end of the skit, the boy gets into the box and the dad hooks up a hovering drone and he lifts off. The lady watches him fly away over the trees with this bewildered look on her face.
As it turns out, kids really were delivered via the mail back when the Postal Service’s Parcel Post first started in 1913.
The parents who blazed the trail, according to Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum and United States Postal Service historians, are Jesse and Mathilda Beauge of Ohio. They apparently mailed their 8-month-old son to his grandma about a mile away for a whopping 15 cents. A clipping of a newspaper article found in the public domain by the Smithsonian Institution said, “The ‘package’ was well wrapped and ready for ‘mailing’ when the carrier got it.”
In another, more famous case, was the shipment of a four-year-old girl in February 19, 1914, by train to a location about 73 miles away. But, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds since her second cousin, who also happened to be a clerk for the railway, traveled along as chaperon.
The longest documented shipment of a child was Edna Neff in 1915. The six-year-old traveled from Pensacola, Florida, to Christianburg, Virginia.
In the last known account of a child being shipped, a newspaper article (also in the public domain) said in part, “The child wore a pink dress to which was sewed a shipping tag, covered on one side with thirty-three cents in stamps.” She wasn’t taped up in a box though, witnesses said she sat on the carrier’s knees eating an apple. Once Maude Smith, the three-year-old, made it to her destination, the carrier wrote, according to the same article, “To Postmaster Hadden, Aug. 31, 1915, Postmaster Jackson, Ky., Dear Sir–Baby received 8:15, Caney, Ky., by postmaster in person.”
It’s hard for me to imagine a child being sent off in the mail. I guess it goes to show how trusting and moral people were back then, or worse, how little they cared. Maybe it’s a little of both. It’s hard to imagine a lot of the crazy things going on today, too. Sometimes truth is even stranger than fiction.
Lauren Bearden is assistant editor at The News Observer. She can be reached at 706-632-2019 or by email at lauren@thenewsobserver.com.