by Lewis, Dan
Some do, in fact, come back. He averages about $2 per day in return-to-Gary money and occasionally gets a few extra dollars from particularly generous benefactors. In total, he’s seen a few thousand dollars over the years. He’s logged all the bills he’s received back (whether he declares them as income for tax or benefits purposes, who knows) and where they’ve come from. In some cases, the money has traveled as far afield as Australia before returning to Arizona.
We don’t know Gary’s last name—the CBS affiliate declined to publish it—and we don’t know how legal the gambit is, either. Title 18 Section 333 of the United States Code states that anyone who (among other things) “mutilates” or “defaces” a dollar bill may be imprisoned for as long as six months, but only if that person did so “with intent to render [the bill] unfit to be reissued.” Gary’s clear intent is to get spendable money back via the mail (and yes, you can legally send cash through the U.S. Postal Service) and not to render these dollar bills unfit for use. In any case, as of the winter of 2013, Gary hasn’t been arrested for his create-your-own-rebate program.
BONUS FACT:
Dollar bills get passed around a lot—so much, in fact, that according to a 2009 report in National Geographic, nine out of ten George Washingtons are tainted with cocaine. Microscopic amounts of coke residue get into the bills’ fibers during drug deals and after being used by drug snorters as straws, and they remain there as the bills work their way back into circulation.
PENNIES FROM EVERYWHERE
THE COLLEGE STUDENT WHO MICRO-FUNDED HIS OWN SCHOLARSHIP
College tuition is expensive, at least in the United States. The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for example, charges an estimated $33,000 per year (as of 2014) to in-state students who live on campus. That price shoots up to over $56,000 if you hail from outside of California due to “nonresident supplemental tuition.” The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I) has a similar price tag, with a base tuition of $35,000 for out-of-staters (and just under $20,000 for in-state students) plus an estimated $10,000 for room, board, and other expenses. That comes to about $30,000 for in-state students, or $45,000 for nonresidents, per year.
So you can see why someone from Illinois would prefer to go to U of I than, say, UCLA. Out of the gate, they’re saving roughly half the cost. Still, $27,000 a year for four years is a lot of money. Even with grants and scholarships and student loans available, that’s a significant expense for almost anyone. In 1987, a U of I freshman named Mike Hayes figured out a neat way to cut his costs. He asked a columnist at the Chicago Tribune to help him find donors to back his education—one penny at a time.
That year, Hayes wrote to columnist Bob Greene with his novel idea. If Hayes could get 2.8 million people to each send him one penny, his tuition, room, board, and the like would be paid for in full. (For a current U of I student, that would be one year’s fees. For Hayes, that was for all four years.)
It was an outlandish request, sure, but perhaps it played on Greene’s ego. (Greene, in 2002, would resign from the Tribune in disgrace for having had a sexual encounter fourteen years earlier with a seventeen-year-old student. A CNN personality commented that Greene was “famous for using his position as a columnist . . . to try to get women into bed.”) On September 6, 1987, Greene wrote a column-slash-call-to-action, hoping to get those 2.8 million pennies for the young Mr. Hayes. They both realized that the challenge was, probably, foolish:
Mike Hayes knows—and I know—the real dilemma here.
Right now, every person who is reading this column is thinking, “That’s a pretty funny idea. I think I’ll send the kid a penny.”
But the vast majority of you won’t. You’ll chuckle, and maybe shake your head, and if someone else is in the room you might mention this to him or her. But then you’ll just turn the page and forget about it.
It’s not that the penny means anything to you. It’s just that getting out of your chair, finding an envelope, addressing it, putting a stamp on it, and remembering to drop it in a mailbox is a lot of trouble.
Well . . . not a lot of trouble. But more trouble than you’re willing to deal with.
Twice in the article, Greene posted Hayes’s P.O. Box address. When Hayes graduated in 1991, Greene did a follow-up piece. The result: Hayes did not get the 2.8 million pennies. He got far fewer than that—but, to make up for it, he received a bunch of nickels and quarters and even some paper currency and checks. People from all fifty states and a few places overseas sent small donations to Hayes. Most of the money—$23,000 of it—came within the first few weeks. During that short time, the postmaster of Hayes’s hometown estimates that Hayes received roughly 70,000 pieces of mail, meaning the average donation was in the thirty-five-cent range, plus another twenty-two cents for postage.
In the end, he collected $29,000—more than enough to cover his education. As for the leftover $1,000, Hayes decided to pay it forward:
Mike plans to give the extra $1,000 to a deserving college student from one of the families that sent him pennies. “I’m not going to be real scientific about it,” he said. “I’m just going to stick my hand into those 90,000 letters we saved, start calling people whose names are on the envelopes I grab, and ask if there’s a person in their family who needs $1,000 for college. I’m going to trust them—I’m going to count on them to tell me if they don’t really need the college money. If they don’t need it, I’ll move on to the next envelope.”
That’s 100,000 pennies, in case you’re counting.
BONUS FACT
At the bottom of the Grand Canyon lives a tribe of Native Americans known as the Havasupai. In order for the United States Postal Service to deliver mail to the Havasupai, mail carriers have to travel by mule. Each mule carries approximately 130 pounds of mail and packages down the eight-mile trail daily, totaling about 41,000 pounds each week, according to the USPS. (The Postal Service discontinued the route in mid-2013.) The pennies Hayes was hoping for, 2.8 million, would weigh about seventy-seven tons. It’d take about twenty-six days for the USPS to deliver them to a college student living in the Grand Canyon.
MAY-L
THE CHEAPEST (NOW ILLEGAL) WAY TO SEND YOUR DAUGHTER TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE
On February 19, 1914, a train departed from Grangeville, Idaho. One of its stops was Lewiston, another town in Idaho, located about seventy-five miles to the northwest. There was nothing particularly special about the train that day—no derailments or explosions or heists, and nothing as significant as even a five-minute delay. The train carried passengers and mail, just like it did whenever it ran, and everything and everyone arrived without complaint. Little Charlotte May Pierstorff, a five-year-old girl who was traveling from her parents’ house to see her grandma and grandpa, got off the train and was escorted to grandma’s without a problem.
Until a government official learned of May’s trip.
The problem wasn’t that May was a kindergarten-aged girl riding a train without a parent or guardian—that seemed to be no big deal at all, in fact. The problem was that she wasn’t a passenger—not technically, at least. A passenger ticket for the ride would have cost her parents roughly a day’s wages, which wasn’t a viable option for them. Tossing a five-year-old onto a train as a stowaway wasn’t an option, either . . . unless one is criminally insane, and there was no reason to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Pierstorff were anything other than good parents. They were resourceful, though, and found another loophole: stick fifty-three cents’ worth of stamps on her coat and mail her.
At the time, the U.S. Postal Service would accept any package weighing fifty pounds or less, and little Miss Pierstorff weighed only forty-eight and a half. There were no regulations against sending people through the post—it’s probably one of those things that you just assume customers won’t do, so why bother having a rule? In this case, the downside of mailing a daughter was pretty low. Sure, she had to ride in the mail compartment, but that was probably a lot of fun for the five-year-old. A
rguably, it was safer, since she was aboard the train without a chaperone.
There was another benefit, too. Not only did she get to grandma’s house cheaper—it only cost about $12 in today’s dollars—but being a piece of mail, the Postal Service wasn’t done with the child when the train arrived. While Grandma and Grandpa would have had to pick up May at the train station (or otherwise provide for her continued travel) had she been a normal passenger, that wasn’t the case here. The mail clerk on duty in Lewiston, a man named Leonard Mochel, had to deliver her from the train station to her grandmother's house, which he successfully did.
Soon after hearing of Pierstorff’s story, the Postmaster General ended the ability of customers to send people through the mail.
BONUS FACT
In 1958, a New York diamond merchant named Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institute. At forty-five-and-a-half carats, the gem is worth an estimated $200 million (give or take $50 million), but Winston didn’t hire an armored car to deliver it to the Smithsonian. He sent it via the U.S. Postal Service, placing it in a box, wrapping the box in brown paper, and insuring it for $145.29.
EVERY MONTH THEY’RE HUSTLIN’
WHY CONGRESS GETS FREE (AHEM) MEN’S MAGAZINES
Junk mail today usually consists of catalogues offering all sorts of products for sale, but typically, those products are not sexual. In the early to mid-1960s, though, that wasn’t the case. It was not uncommon for people to open their mailboxes to find something they wouldn’t want their twelve-year-old son to see (even if he really wanted to see it). In the latter part of that decade, the federal government passed a law (39 U.S.C. § 3008 if you’d like to look it up) aiming to help. The new rule: if you received “any pandering advertisement which offers for sale matter which the addressee in his sole discretion believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative,” you could ask your post office to issue a “prohibitory order”—that is, the Postal Service could make the sender stop sending that stuff to you.
By the early 1980s, the law had been through the legal system and come out perfectly fine, despite a challenge claiming that it violated the senders’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. So when Larry Flint, the publisher of Hustler magazine, started sending his nudie mags to all 535 members of Congress—free and unsolicited—in late 1983, many congressmen asked the post office for prohibitory orders. By October of the following year, 264 of those congressional offices had demanded, via the post office, that their free subscriptions be halted.
Flint stopped, under the advice of counsel, and then sued.
His argument was a First Amendment one, but ultimately it didn’t rest on freedom of speech. The First Amendment also guarantees, among other things, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Flint argued that he was trying to lead members of Congress to a revelation, opening their eyes to the world around them. As he told The Hill magazine in 2011, “Moses freed the Jews, Lincoln freed the slaves, and I just wanted to free all the neurotics.”
The court agreed.
So every month, each member of Congress receives a plain manila envelope in the mail containing a few dozen pages of satire, political commentary, and naked women. Most offices file the magazines immediately into the recycling bin. But as one congressional staffer anonymously told National Journal, some magazines have been put to a different, arguably better use:
For a while, the interns, after their initial shock and befuddlement, were directed to save the Hustlers. We eventually gave a coworker the whole year’s supply for Secret Santa and then she would mail them to her boyfriend in Iraq. Certainly one of the least-heralded ways the office supported our troops.
But yeah, most just throw them out.
BONUS FACT
Larry Flint is no stranger to the courtroom, often litigating First Amendment issues. But his most famous legal battle, Keeton v. Hustler, was about the inner workings of the legal system (personal jurisdiction, if your vocabulary includes legal terms of art). He lost and wasn’t very happy about it. After losing the case, he temporarily found himself in contempt of court, for, while still in the Supreme Court building and within earshot of the Justices, dropping an f-bomb, calling the eight male Justices a choice word, and referring to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as a token (highly offensive word that starts with the letter “c”). Charges were dropped shortly thereafter.
NEITHER RAIN NOR SLEET NOR 140,000 POTHOLES
THE TOUGH ROAD TO BECOMING A POSTAL TRUCK
In the United States, people drive on the right side of the road. To make driving and turning easier, the driver usually sits on the left side of the car, placing him or her closer to the center of traffic. There is, however, one notable exception to that latter rule. Mail carriers, in most cases, sit in the right side of their mail trucks—they have to be on the curb side of the vehicle in order to reach mailboxes without having to exit. This feature alone makes mail trucks unique among American motor vehicles. But the differences don’t stop there. The white box-shaped trucks you see slowly tootling around the neighborhood have gone through a testing process unlike any other in the area.
The door-to-door mail truck most commonly in use today is called the Grumman LLV, short for Long-Life Vehicle. It was created in the 1980s and is the first vehicle specifically created for the U.S. Postal Service—prior to the LLV, the post office purchased all sorts of available vehicles (often military or government surplus) and repurposed them to serve mail carriers as well as possible. However, the driving needs of a postal truck are much different than almost all other cars out there, so the Postal Service and Grumman worked on a prototype in 1985 to meet those needs.
The tests were rigorous and tedious—as well as bumpy. According to the Smithsonian Institute, the prototypes were subjected to tests that would make most people incredibly carsick. Prototypes had to drive over 2,800 miles while stopping every 250 feet (simulating a whole lot of mailbox deliveries)—that’s roughly the equivalent of driving from New York to Los Angeles while stopping more than 60,000 times. The trucks also had to drive more than 10,000 miles over gravel roads at speeds of thirty to forty-five mph and another 1,000 miles over three- to four-inch-high cobblestones, albeit at only ten to fifteen miles per hour. Then there were the potholes: Each of the prototypes’ four wheels had to hit at least 35,000 test potholes, often while travelling ten to fifteen miles per hour.
The LLVs are made of corrosion-resistant aluminum and therefore rarely rust. Most cars are made from steel, which is cheaper, but then most cars aren’t intended to last as long as mail trucks. Grumman began producing the LLVs in 1987, meeting the U.S. Postal Service’s order of 100,000 to 140,000 vehicles (reports vary) within a few years. As it turned out, the Long Life Vehicles really have had long lives. Even though these trucks are still commonly seen in cities and suburbs throughout the United States, Grumman stopped production of them in 1994, meaning that even the newest LLV is two decades old.
The LLVs will be retired soon, though. Not because they no longer work or are too expensive to maintain, but because of environmental concerns. Like most cars of the 1980s and 1990s, they aren’t very fuel efficient and will likely be replaced by hybrids or full-electric models over time.
BONUS FACT
In the United States, mail trucks are not required to have (and typically do not have) license plates.
CANNONBALL RUN
THE FASTEST WAY TO DRIVE FROM NEW YORK TO L.A.
If you ask Google Maps how long it will take you to go from New York City to the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, California, you’ll find out that the 2,800-mile trip will take you roughly forty-four hours by car. That’s nonstop—no allowances for sleep, meals, bathroom breaks, or even refueling, and certainly no sightseeing. For the vast majority of us, that forty-four-hour estimate for any such cross-country trip is entirely meaningless. We’d take it slow, spreading the trip over at least four days, probably closer to six. We’d stop often along the
way, making the trip part of the adventure itself.
For Ed Bolian, the forty-four-hour estimate is similarly meaningless, but for the exact opposite reason. He wanted to get from Manhattan to Redondo Beach is much less time. Two-thirds of the time, in fact.
In 1933, a man named Edwin Baker—“Cannonball” Baker as he’d later become known—made the New York to Los Angeles trip in roughly fifty-three and a half hours, easily a record at the time. (The interstate highway system hadn’t been built yet, so Baker’s fifty-mile-per-hour average speed was accomplished on county roads and unpaved thoroughfares.) Forty years later, that record still stood. It might have become a small piece of American folklore, mostly forgotten. However, when the 1973 oil crisis hit the American economy, Baker’s trip returned to the public eye. The oil shortage led to the creation of a national minimum-speed law of fifty-five miles per hour in hopes of curtailing oil use. In protest, a group of car aficionados organized “Cannonball Run,” a cross-country race, as reported by ABC News.
Cannonball Run (which inspired the 1981 movie of the same name) didn’t require race organizers or the like—participants just needed to drive from Manhattan to the Portofino Hotel in the Los Angeles area and keep verifiable track of the time. Over the past forty or so years, Baker’s record has been replaced many times over. In 1983, two men made the trip in thirty-two hours and seven minutes in a Ferrari 308. That mark stood until 2006, when a guy named Alex Roy led a team that did the trip in thirty-one hours and seven minutes.