She found shocking truth on McHenry family. Modesto museum aims to honor historian
Modesto's McHenry Museum is looking to add space to honor a late historian whose biggest legacy may be discovering that the venue's famed namesake actually was an impostor.
But more on that impostor thing later.
The city of Modesto, which owns the museum, is raising funds for a Janet Lancaster History Center in the downtown historic building, according to Cultural Services Program Manager Jessica Flores, who runs the museum.
The history center would offer new services and programs for the community, Flores said in an email interview.
At this point, the addition is 'just an idea' that would need to be fully funded by community donations, she said. It's too soon in the process to know how much it would cost, but the effort already has received $8,500 in donations.
The hope is to create three connected areas for the Lancaster center, she said. Again, it's too early to tell how much of the around 17,000-square-foot museum's space it will occupy, Flores said. It won't cut into any of the exhibit areas.
The first area would be a research room on the museum's first floor to house reference books and the most requested research material.
A second area would be used for workshops and classes to help people with their own preservation projects, such as digitizing photo negatives or family history research.
The third would be a staff workspace.
Asked about construction, Flores said, 'Most of the space we need already exists. The idea is to create enough space to support research, provide education, and preserve the collection.'
There are thousands of items to view and use at the museum, she said.
'We began acquiring in the late 1960s, and by the mid-1970s there were already about 30,000 objects cataloged by hand. Staff are currently undertaking a collection assessment, and part of that is to digitally catalog everything. At the end, we'll have a searchable database, which will help us support the public with research efforts.'
The collection consists of 'a little bit of everything,' she said, including photos and documents, 'but we also have more obscure artifacts like hair jewelry and used Civil War bandages.'
Most of the museum's collection has come from community members.
Janet Lancaster was a Modesto native and teacher who started her career at El Vista School in 1957, according to David Seymour, executive director of the McHenry Museum and Historical Society.
She also was an avid historian. She volunteered at the museum for more than 20 years, organizing archives, photos and documents in the basement, Seymour said.
'Every Friday, you could find Janet Lancaster at the McHenry Museum,' he said. She didn't have a lot of space to work, which is part of the goal for the city's plan.
While Lancaster, who died in September 2024, was an 'extremely private person,' she did much for the community, Seymour said, including discovering that the famed Modesto McHenry family members weren't actually McHenrys.
According to a 2013 story in The Modesto Bee, 'everything McHenry in Modesto began when Robert McHenry arrived here sometime around 1850. That, McHenry Museum researcher Janet Lancaster ... discovered, includes the invention (or reinvention) of McHenry himself.'
Her project to learn more about his personal and family histories became a three-year investigation that ultimately changed some of what local historians believed for more than a century, according to The Bee story.
'Robert McHenry no doubt helped transform the Valley and build Modesto. But, Lancaster found, he wasn't the man folks thought he was back then,' the story said.
Born Robert Henry Brewster in Vermont in 1827, he was a direct descendant of Mayflower elder William Brewster, The Bee story recounted. 'He signed up for a five-year hitch as a rifleman in a newly formed Ohio Army regiment in 1846, told he'd be guarding forts along the Oregon Trail. But when the Army commandeered his regiment to fight in the Mexican-American War, he deserted.'
A few years later, Lancaster found that Brewster surfaced in Stockton as Robert McHenry, dropping Brewster and adding 'Mc' to his middle name, according to the story. 'Within a couple of years, he settled along the Stanislaus River, became one of Modesto's most influential citizens, and the rest is, well, history. Or legend.'
Seymour said Lancaster's work on Robert McHenry was her biggest legacy.
Perhaps that was meant to be.
'She actually grew up on McHenry Avenue. 'It's like her entire life (was) McHenry,' Seymour said.
Community money is needed for the Lancaster space, and an upcoming 'Historic 14th St. Walking Tour of Modesto' is among the fundraisers, Seymour said.
The tour is set for 4-7 p.m. Friday, May 30, and includes a look at the history of four former homes on 14th Street:
▪ The Hatton-Davis house at 909 14th, which is now home for Love Stanislaus
▪ The DeLappe house at 914 14th, now Provident Care
▪ The Elias-Haris house at 1015 14th, now Hawks and Associates
▪ And the Maddux-Morgan house at 1126 14th, now the Queen Bean.
Tickets for the tour are $25, available at the museum.
In addition, the Modesto Art Museum is offering a $5,000 matching contribution for the Lancaster center, according to Bob Barzan, treasurer and member of the group's board of directors.
The match comes with the dissolution of the Modesto Art Museum, Barzan said. It has been website-based with no building, but has done pop-up events in the city over the years.
The art museum is dissolving because it has not been able to attract new board members, according to Barzan.
'This (matching challenge) is part of our going away,' he said. 'We have a fair amount of money and have been giving it away to various nonprofits.'
Those who want to donate for the matching challenge can do so payable to McHenry Museum, with the memo 101479 JLancaster and sent to the McHenry Museum, Attention: Jessica Flores, PRN at P.O. Box 642, Modesto, CA 95353.
'We wanted to do something for the McHenry Museum and this seemed like a good way before we closed,' Barzan said.
The museum features history from across Stanislaus County, with each city having its own archive, Seymour said.
Admission to the museum is free.
According to its website, www.mchenrymuseum.org, visitors will see a number of exhibits, such as gold mining artifacts, the founding of Modesto by railroad, irrigation development, agriculture and re-creations of a general store, a blacksmith shop, a one-room schoolhouse, a barbershop 'of days-gone-by,' a 1950s diner setting and more.
The museum also has temporary exhibits that change periodically.
There's a McMobile Museum that takes Stanislaus County history to various community events, as well as periodic historic CemeTours of local cemeteries. Both are programs of the museum's historical society. The next CemeTour will be on Memorial Day, May 26.
The Lancaster center would make the McHenry Museum's historical resources more available to the community, according to Flores.
'A lot of times people think that archives are 'off-limits,' or you need to be a serious scholar to access them, but really, we're here to serve as a resource to all who are interested in local history,' she said.
Lancaster 'worked extremely hard' to make the McHenry Museum the central place for local historical information, Flores said. '...We are continuing to build on her efforts to establish something she would be proud of.'
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Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Jim Crow meets ICE at ‘Alligator Alcatraz'
A few years ago I came across a profoundly unnerving historical photo: A lineup of terrified, naked Black babies cowered over the title 'Alligator Bait.' As it turned out, the idea of Black babies being used as alligator bait was a beloved trope dating back to the antebellum South, though it didn't really take off until after the Civil War. The image I saw was created in 1897, just one year after Plessy vs. Ferguson established 'separate but equal' as the foundational doublespeak of segregation. With formerly enslaved people striking out and settling their own homesteads, the prevailing stereotypes deployed to justify violence against Black people were forced to evolve. We were no longer simple and primitive, in desperate need of the civilizing stewardship of white Christian slave owners. After emancipation, we became dangerous, lazy and worthless. Worth less, in fact, than the chickens more commonly used to bait alligators. White Floridians in particular so fell in love with the concept of alligators hungry for Black babies that it birthed an entire industry. Visitors to the Sunshine State could purchase souvenir postcards featuring illustrations of googly-eyed alligators chasing crying Black children. There was a popular brand of licorice called 'Little African,' with packaging that featured a cartoon alligator tugging playfully at a Black infant's rag diaper. The tagline read: 'A Dainty Morsel.' Anglers could buy fishing lures molded in the shape of a Black baby protruding from an alligator's mouth. You get the idea. When I first learned of all this, naturally, I was unmoored. I was also surprised that I'd never heard of the alligator bait slur. Why doesn't it sit alongside the minstrel, the mammy and the golliwog in our cultural memory of racist archetypes? Did it cross some unspoken line with the vulgarity of its violence? Perhaps this particular dog whistle was a tad too audible? Or was it the plausible deniability? Did people (including historians) wave it away because babies were never 'really' used as alligator bait? It's true that beyond the cultural ephemera — which includes songs (such as the ragtime tune 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait') and mechanical alligator toys that swallow Black babies whole, over and over again — there are apparently no surviving records of Black babies sacrificed in this way. No autopsy reports, no court records proving that anyone was apprehended and convicted of said crime. But of course, why would there be? The thing I found so unnerving about the alligator bait phenomenon wasn't its literal veracity. There's no question human beings are capable of that and far worse. Without a doubt, 'civilized' people could find satisfaction — or comfort, or justice, or opportunity — in the violent slaughter of babies. Donald Trump's recently posted AI clip 'Trump Gaza,' which suggests the real world annihilation of Palestinians will give way to luxury beachfront resorts, is a shining example. The thing that haunted me about alligator bait was the glee with which the idea was embraced. It was funny. Cute. Harmless. Can't you take a joke? Now here we are, 100 years after 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait,' and the bigots are once again using cartoon alligators to meme-ify racial violence, this time against immigrants. Just like the title 'Alligator Bait,' the Florida detention center name 'Alligator Alcatraz' serves multiple ends: It provokes sadistic yuks. It mocks. It threatens. But most crucially, it dehumanizes. 'Alligator Bait' suggests that Black people are worthless. By evoking the country's most infamous prison, 'Alligator Alcatraz' frames the conversation as one about keeping Americans safe. It suggests the people imprisoned there are not vulnerable and defenseless men and women; anyone sent to 'Alligator Alcatraz' must be a criminal of the worst sort. Unworthy of basic human rights. Fully deserving of every indignity inflicted upon them. 'Alligator Alcatraz' cloaks cruelty in bureaucratic euphemism. It's doublespeak, masking an agenda to galvanize a bloodthirsty base and make state violence sound reasonable, even necessary. It has nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. Oft-cited studies from Stanford, the Libertarian Cato Institute, the New York Times and others have shown conclusively that immigrants, those here legally and illegally, are significantly less likely to commit violent crimes than their U.S.-born neighbors. If those behind 'Alligator Alcatraz' cared at all about keeping Americans safe, they wouldn't have just pushed a budget bill that obliterates our access to healthcare, environmental protection and food safety. If they actually cherished the rule of law, they would not deny immigrants their constitutionally guaranteed right to due process. If they were truly concerned about crime, there wouldn't be a felon in the White House. As souvenir shops and Etsy stores flood with 'Alligator Alcatraz' merch, it's worth noting that none of it is played for horror. Like the cutesy alligator bait merchandise before it, these aren't monster-movie creatures with blazing eyes and razor-sharp, blood-dripping teeth. The 'Alligator Alcatraz' storefront is cartoon gators slyly winking at us from under red baseball caps: It's just a joke, and you're in on it. And it's exactly this cheeky, palatable, available-in-child-sizes commodification that exposes the true horror for those it targets: There will be no empathy, no change of heart, no seeing of the light. Dear immigrants of America: Your pain is our amusement. The thing I keep wondering is, would this cheekiness even be possible if everyone knew the alligator bait history, the nastiness of which was buried so deep that 'Gator bait' chants echoed through the University of Florida stadium until 2020? Would they still chuckle if they saw the century-old postcards circulated by people who 'just didn't know any better'? My cynical side says: Yeah, probably. But my strategic side reminds me: If history truly didn't matter, it wouldn't be continuously minimized, rewritten, whitewashed. There's truth in the old idiom: Knowledge is power. Anyone trying to keep knowledge from you, whether by banning books, gutting classrooms, denying identities or burying facts, is only trying to disempower you. That's why history, as painful as it often is, matters. Remembering the horror of alligator bait isn't about dwelling on the grotesque. It's about recognizing how cruelty gets coded into culture. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is proof that alligator bait never went away. It didn't evolve or get slicker. It's the same old, tired cruelty, rebranded and aimed at a new target. The goal is exactly the same: to manufacture consent for suffering and ensure the most vulnerable among us know where they stand — as props, as bait, as punchlines. And no joke is more vulgar than one mocking the pain of your neighbors, whether they were born in this country or not. Ezra Claytan Daniels is a screenwriter and graphic novelist whose upcoming horror graphic novel, 'Mama Came Callin',' confronts the legacy of the alligator bait trope.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
She was the bard of loneliness — who thrived on human connection
Having never read her letters before, despite my enduring fandom — it was Dickinson's wry humor that first turned me on to poetry — what struck me was how committed she was to the virtue of human fellowship, even as she pursued her famously solitary art. It wasn't just birds and irony that saved her from despair. It was the love she had for her family, friends, and fellow citizens. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up 'Love is its own rescue,' she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the writer and abolitionist — not a line you'd expect from a poet who encrypts her pain and longing into frosty hymns and riddles, and whose poems are some of the best descriptions of loneliness available. Yet there she is, year after year, mailing birthday messages, valentines, and kudos, sometimes enclosing pressed flowers or clutches of rowan tied with ribbon. She wrote letters consoling friends on the deaths of their young children. She mourned the loss of her Massachusetts neighbors during the Civil War. She seemed to believe that our caring for others constitutes the only paradise we should ever expect. In a letter to Elizabeth Holland in 1877, she asked: 'Is not the distinction, of Affection, almost Realm enough?' She wanted to be alone but to be known too I discovered Emily Dickinson when I was 16. That summer, I was visiting my grandmother in Ripon, Wis., home of Ripon College and birthplace of Abraham Lincoln's (and Samuel Bowles's) Republican Party in 1854. Dickinson's 'Complete Poems' was 700 pages long — a daunting but worthy reading project for a shy aspiring writer who was drawn more to literature than to the politics of his country. It was a wonderful, haunting experience. I liked her dark, obsessive mind, her wicked sense of humor. But it was the fierce longing her poems exuded that kept me reading into the night. 'It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness,' she writes in a poem from 1862. Elsewhere, she calls loneliness 'an Omen in the Bone' and 'the Horror not to be surveyed.' By 16, I had accepted the fact that I liked spending time by myself. And I found that poetry, like prayer, was a socially acceptable if quirky use of solitude. Writing was also a consolation for my frequent inability to communicate to family or friends exactly what I was feeling. Dickinson had this problem, too. Why else would she write a thousand poems and leave them all behind in a drawer? In Dickinson's letters, one can glean the artist's core paradox of desiring personal privacy and social recognition. I'd felt this paradox myself while cooped up in my dorm room writing poems I would never share. Was I going to be a hermit? Would the horror of loneliness swallow me up? Was the urge to write poetry a blessing or a symptom? What would a therapist say? In 'Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development,' the psychoanalyst Otto Rank makes a useful distinction between the neurotic and the artist, both of whom resist the crowd and run the risk of loneliness. A neurotic, he says, is a person whose neglected creative urges become corrosive to the self. An artist turns them into art. I didn't know how lonely I was in my 20s until I reached my 30s. After college, I gave up writing in order to find a proper career, which meant that I became one of Otto Rank's neurotics. It took me a long time to revive my creative urges — to borrow the bleak Freudian term — and part of the process involved reading Emily Dickinson's poems again. This time, it was clear to me she was writing about depression. 'There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons – / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.' There is indeed. And Pfizer could have used these lines for the opening of a Zoloft ad: 'I felt a funeral in my brain.' 'I heard a fly buzz when I died.' 'Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me.' These are the poems that helped establish Dickinson's reputation as a sly gothic eminence, her distressed meters and slant rhymes striking a fatally minor chord. And it's true that she often 'thought of the Grave,' as she puts it, apologetically, in one of her early letters. But Emily Dickinson died of heart failure, not suicide. This fact was very important to me, and also — not to be macabre — a little bit surprising. She was always so at odds with herself, after all, gnawing at psychic wounds or diving back into the wreck, as the poet Adrienne Rich would say. The question is, what sustained her? I think it was other people. To read Dickinson's letters is to witness just how deeply embedded she was in the social world of her day, despite her famous reclusiveness. With editors, she was coy, ironic, and self-mythologizing. 'You ask of my Companions,' she writes to Higginson during their first exchange. 'Hills — Sir — and the Sundown.' But she also wrote long, gossipy letters to her brother, Austin, when he was away, and she corresponded frequently with the far more adventurous writer Helen Hunt Jackson, who scolded Dickinson for her reticence. Her notes to prominent religious men, including Edward Everett Hale and the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, crackle with wit and genuine theological curiosity. And of course, this latest volume of her correspondence also includes her hundreds of 'letter-poems,' many of which she sent to Susan Gilbert, her friend and sister-in-law, for amusement and commentary. ('Is this frostier?' she asks Gilbert when sending a newly revised draft.) Her humor never flags. At age 50, she wrote: 'We have had two hurricanes within as many hours, one of which came near enough to untie my apron.' She sends honey to a friend with this note: 'Lest any bee should boast.' Still, that longing one feels in her poems gusted through her entire life. 'There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world never can fill,' she writes to her friend Abiah Root at the age of 16, half in response to a religious revival sweeping through her hometown of Amherst. She's pleased for those who were saved by God, but she herself demurs. The whole idea of Eternity, she writes, appears 'dreadful' to her. She assumes that she is 'wicked.' And yet she consistently honors her friends' belief in the Christian afterlife. Heaven was an abstraction, but the people she loved were real to her, and letter-writing offered her a way to remain in communion with them, to express her otherwise wholly Christian kindness and devotion. 'A Letter is a joy of Earth,' she wrote in 1885, less than a year before her death. 'It is denied the Gods.' Elsewhere, she compares a letter to 'immortality.' It was in the realm of her mind where she and her friends could coexist forever. As the late scholar and Harvard professor Helen Vendler puts it: 'The thought that on the Last Day she would be reunited with those she had loved was so moving to Dickinson that she wrote some of her most gripping poems about that imagined reunion.' She made her friends immortal One reason Dickinson's correspondence seems heroic to me is that there are 30,000 unread emails in my inbox. Many of these are spam, but a truly unacceptable percentage of them are not. I am so behind on email that I fantasize about changing my name and creating a new email address to achieve the illusion of a fresh start. My grandmother wasn't like this. She wrote and received letters all the time. She was active in her community — the college, the church, the golf course. She played gin rummy once a week. She babysat the kid next door. She helped me join a baseball team so that I could stand in center field and sniff my glove while mulling over Emily Dickinson's imagery. In contrast, I find social life mysteriously exhausting. Especially the digital version. I just cannot seem to keep up with all the requests, notifications, invitations to follow, and so on. Part of my struggle has to do with a garden-variety case of the blues. But if Emily Dickinson, whose blue periods often lasted for weeks at a time, could remember to wish her cousin a happy birthday, why can't I? One possible answer is that there's something wrong with me. Maybe I never recovered from my early preference for solitude. Maybe I, too, have an 'aching void' in my heart that the world can never fill. Or maybe — this is my most recent hypothesis — we all do. In her 1963 essay 'On the Sense of Loneliness,' the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argues that loneliness results from the ego's desire for wholeness, what she calls 'an unattainable perfect internal state.' Poetry is one way of pursuing that unattainable state. Perhaps that's why Dickinson wrote the same poem again and again with slight variations. She never achieved wholeness. 'Full and permanent integration is never possible,' Klein writes, 'for some polarity between the life and death instincts always persists.' I think that's what I responded to in Dickinson — that 'polarity,' the tension between a desire for connection and an equally strong desire for isolation. I wonder, because I'm a teacher now, what that tension feels like to young people today, who report being lonelier and more depressed than ever. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps for teens, including a growing number of AI chatbots designed to teach coping skills or simply offer companionship (the psychologist Paul Bloom calls this ' Recently, I've begun to consider assigning Dickinson's letters instead. At the very least, they model how to weather a bout of depression without forgetting to send buttercups to neighbors for the centennial. More important, they demonstrate that community is the work of imagination to a surprising degree. The author Marilynne Robinson makes this point in one of her essays. 'Community,' she writes, 'consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.' In that same essay, she refers to this love as the 'essence and genius' of democracy. To overcome our loneliness, we do not need to join a church or a bowling league, as Robert Putnam suggests in his landmark book on civic decay, 'Bowling Alone . ' But we do need to find ways to exercise compassion. Compassion feels in short supply these days, and it's tempting to blame our digital culture for exacerbating our epidemic of loneliness. But Kristen Radtke, author of 'Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, ' is skeptical of the claim that the internet is the primary cause of social isolation. People made this claim about the telephone and the radio, too. Yet there is clearly something unique about 'the portal,' as Patricia Lockwood calls the internet in 'No One Is Talking About This,' her novel about the absurdity of life on social media. 'Why did the portal feel so private,' the narrator asks at one point, 'when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?' In an interview, Lockwood confessed that what attracted her to Twitter was the chance to become 'a spirit in a void.' A Dickinsonian sentiment, and maybe a universal one. But the lesson of Dickinson's letters is that she wasn't just a spirit in a void. 'I know I love my friends,' she writes to Louisa and Frances Norcross in 1873, adding: ''tis love for them that sets the blister in my throat, many a time of day.' These bonds were important to Dickinson, especially in seasons of grief. Wherever else her friends had gone, they lived on in her memory, a verifiable afterlife, and remained eternal companions. As she writes in a letter to Mary Hills: 'To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is heaven.'
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Boston Globe
From Benjamin Franklin to Pony Express to anthrax: How the US Postal Service shaped a nation
While it now grapples with concerns over its financial viability in the modern era, the agency has had a long and colorful history that helped shape the nation. It has grown from serving the 13 colonies to delivering more mail than any other postal system in the world, reaching nearly 169 million addresses and employing more than 635,000 people. Advertisement A new postal service In those early days, creating an American postal system was a key priority for the nation's founders, who needed to communicate with the Continental Army and the colonies. When the Continental Congress met in 1775, it appointed Franklin as the first postmaster because he had served in the British postal service for North America. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The early postal system also became crucial to unifying the diverse, fragmented colonies into a nation by spreading ideas of liberty and independence through letters, newspapers and pamphlets. 'People were reading, getting ideas of what it would be like to be an independent country,' Kochersperger said. Westward expansion When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Congress was granted power to establish post offices and mail routes that were first used by mail carriers on horseback and later upgraded for stagecoaches. Some evolved into highways still used today. Advertisement Initially running north–south along the East Coast, post roads later extended westward. Historians have said this aided settler expansion into Native lands and was intertwined with the displacement of tribes. As western migration accelerated, mail was sent by ship from New York to Central America and on to California. Delivery typically took two to three months. The Pony Express, operated by private carriers, was started to speed things up. A relay system of riders on horseback carried mail from California to Missouri, the furthest westward railroad stop. The 1,800-mile (2,900-kilometer) journey took 10 days. While legendary, it only lasted about 18 months, until Oct. 26, 1861. The service was scuttled by the Civil War and made obsolete with the advent of the telegraph, said Daniel Piazza, chief curator of philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Later, the transcontinental railroad reduced mail delivery from months to days. New types of delivery Free mail delivery to homes began in earnest in 1863 in the nation's largest cities. It was initially created as a response to grief during the Civil War. At the time, the only communication from a father, brother, husband or son usually came through letter-writing. Women lined up daily at post offices, awaiting word. They sometimes got their own letters back, with a note saying their loved one had been killed. Postal officials in Cleveland decided to take mail to people's homes out of compassion. Enthusiasm for home delivery spread quickly, and people living in rural areas wanted it, too. Despite logistical challenges, rural free delivery began expanding rapidly around 1900. By the 1920s, mail carriers mostly had replaced horse-drawn wagons with automobiles. Advertisement Around that time, mail started being sent by airplane as well. The nation's first regularly scheduled airmail service began on May 15, 1918. The initial routes were between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York, using Army pilots and planes. The post office soon took over air mail, running operations for nine years until turning to fledgling private airline companies, some of which remain major airlines. In the early days, flights were so dangerous that some pilots dubbed themselves the Suicide Club. Thirty-two pilots were killed. Major changes to the system The postal service saw major growth during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's time in office. His New Deal plan to address the Great Depression put people to work building 2,000 new post offices. After World War II, a booming economy and growing population led to a surge in mail. To handle the increasing volume, the post office needed a faster alternative to manual sorting. So, on July 1, 1963, each post office was given a five-digit ZIP code. Previously, clerks had to memorize thousands of points of address information so they could sort the mail, Kochersperger said. The public was skeptical at first, balking at more numbers. So, the post office came up with a friendly cartoon character named Mr. ZIP, who helped convince people their mail would arrive faster. By 1970, postal workers were angry over low wages and a strike was called by leaders of the National Association of Letter Carriers union in New York. Eventually about 200,000 workers joined the postal stoppage, which led to the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. It authorized collective bargaining rights for postal workers and transformed the taxpayer-supported Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service, a financially self-sustaining and independent agency within the executive branch. Advertisement In more recent times, U.S. Postal Service workers have faced various threats, including anthrax, a serious infectious bacterial disease. Weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, four threatening letters contaminated with anthrax were sent through the mail. Two workers at a mail distribution center in Washington, D.C. died after breathing in the spores, and thousands were potentially exposed. Three other people were killed, and more than a dozen were sickened. The anthrax scare led to major changes in how mail was monitored and sorted and how USPS workers protected themselves. Years later, they'd be designated essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and don protective gear again. Haigh reported from Hartford, Conn.
