Mr. ZIP, who stood in the lobby of the Lewes Post Office in the 1960s reminding residents to use their ZIP code. Gift of the Lewes Post Office, 2011.5.1.
90210 may have a catchier ring to it thanks to the hit 1990s TV series, but Lewes’s 19958 ZIP Code has its own story to share. It is characterized (literally and figuratively) by Mr. ZIP, a creation of the Lewes Post Office to encourage the use of ZIP Codes to help with the efficient sorting and transit of mail. We’d like to thank Linda DeAngelis, Postmaster of the Lewes Post Office for donating to the piece to the Society. Additional information about postal history in Delaware can be found in the 1938 publication “A Postal History of Delaware,” by Harvey Corchran Bounds and, for a more detailed history of Lewes’s Post Office, in “Venerable Lewistown Post Office,” by H. Edward Maull, Jr., in Volume XI (2008) of The Journal of The Lewes Historical Society.
We posted a picture at our Facebook page a few days ago and received some nice feedback about Mr. ZIP. Andy Shaw, who grew up in Lewes, remembered Mr. ZIP standing guard in the post office lobby, reminding Lewestowners to add 19958 to all their mailings. At this point in time, we do not know who created Mr. ZIP; if any one has information about this or memories of Mr. ZIP, please let us know by emailing info [at] historiclewes . org.
The institutionalization of ZIP Codes has an interesting history. The information below is from about.com and is a nice summary of how our ZIP codes came to be.
The social correspondence of the earlier century gave way, gradually at first, and then explosively, to business mail. By 1963, business mail constituted 80 percent of the total volume. The single greatest impetus in this great outpouring of business mail was the computer, which brought centralization of accounts and a growing mass of utility bills and payments, bank deposits and receipts, advertisements, magazines, insurance premiums, credit card transactions, department store and mortgage billings, and payments, dividends, and Social Security checks traveling through the mail.
In June 1962, the Presidentially appointed Advisory Board of the Post Office Department, after a study of its overall mechanization problems, made several primary recommendations. One was that the Department give priority to the development of a coding system, an idea that had been under consideration in the Department for a decade or more.
Over the years, a number of potential coding programs had been examined and discarded. Finally, in 1963, the Department selected a system advanced by department officials, and, on April 30, 1963, Postmaster General John A. Gronouski announced that the ZIP Code would begin on July 1, 1963.
Preparing for the new system was a major task involving realignment of the mail system. The Post Office had recognized some years back that new avenues of transportation would open to the Department and began to establish focal points for air, highway, and rail transportation. Called the Metro System, these transportation centers were set up around 85 of the country’s larger cities to deflect mail from congested, heavily traveled city streets. The Metro concept was expanded and eventually became the core of 552 sectional centers, each serving between 40 and 150 surrounding post offices.
Once these sectional centers were delineated, the next step in establishing the ZIP Code was to assign codes to the centers and the postal addresses they served. The existence of postal zones in the larger cities, set in motion in 1943, helped to some extent, but, in cases where the old zones failed to fit within the delivery areas, new numbers had to be assigned.
By July 1963, a five-digit code had been assigned to every address throughout the country. The first digit designated a broad geographical area of the United States, ranging from zero for the Northeast to nine for the far West. This was followed by two digits that more closely pinpointed population concentrations and those sectional centers accessible to common transportation networks. The final two digits designated small post offices or postal zones in larger zoned cities.
ZIP Code began on July 1, 1963, as scheduled. Use of the new code was not mandatory at first for anyone, but, in 1967, the Post Office required mailers of second- and third-class bulk mail to presort by ZIP Code.
