People Sent Their Children Through the Mail?
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Christopher Warren shares one of the strangest chapters in U.S. Postal Service history: the time when Americans actually sent children through the mail. In the early 1900s, families, especially in rural areas, took advantage of parcel post rules to ship their kids across towns, counties, and even state lines. And it didn’t stop there. In one case, an entire bank was sent through the postal system. This bizarre and often hilarious look at early 20th-century mail shows just how far people would go to work around the system and how the Postal Service had to adapt.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
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| 0:13.9 | And this season, I'm digging into the tech stories we weren't told. |
| 0:17.4 | Starting with Stacey Spikes, the black founder of movie pass who got pushed out of the company |
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| 0:29.3 | And that was that moment. |
| 0:30.7 | Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. |
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| 1:05.3 | Music And we return to our American stories. |
| 1:19.3 | And up next, another story from our rule of law series. |
| 1:23.0 | Christopher Warren of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum is here to share about how some bizarre rules came to be, like why you can't send your child through the mail. |
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