Today in Greenfield, almost all of the mail carriers have their own postal service trucks or vehicles to deliver letters, magazines and packages on their route. That was not the case years ago, including when I worked for the Greenfield Post Office between the mid-1940s and 1990.
Greenfield had two old, dark green trucks without heat that were used to deliver packages to homes and businesses. They were also used to bring mail that was sorted by each carrier to large, green metal boxes spaced throughout town. You could not put letters to be mailed in these boxes. They were called relay boxes to hold additional mail. Each carrier, along his trip, would open these boxes with a key to get more mail he sorted for additional stops along his route. Some routes were very long ones and it took a lot of energy to finish the route each and every day.
After the end of World War II in the late 1940s and 1950s, the Eastern Textile Company — still in business in 2018 — advertised in newspapers in the southern United States to highlight its cut cloth in different fabrics and colors. When shipped, these bundles of cloth were wrapped in brown paper, taped and most of them had a Collect on Delivery (COD) tag indicating that the mailman would collect payment for the cloth upon delivery.
Eventually, businesses would get their money through the postal service system. All the CODs sent out by the Eastern Textile Company had to be stamped twice on the tag and bundled with a rubber stamp telling the day it was sent out. Back then, you could buy postage on a postage meter machine and a tape similar to stamps would be put on each mailing.
The owners of the Eastern Textile Company, at that time, used different amounts of stamps to cover the postage for each bundle of cloth that was mailed. We had metal rollers to cancel all the stamps. These bundles of cloth were sorted separately to prevent damage to them, and then they were on their way to the clients that ordered them. This, I think, helped the Eastern Textile Company’s business in many ways.
So many businesses, factories and the public brought their mail to the Greenfield Post Office and we were always busy shipping the mail all over the world and especially throughout America.