DC -- Natl Postal Museum -- Exhibit (Case): Letters With Wings (Preview):
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Description of Pictures: Letters With Wings: The Dream of Airmail, 1918-1938
In 2018, the National Postal Museum will celebrate the 100th anniversary of regularly scheduled airmail by presenting a special exhibition tentatively titled "Letters With Wings".
These cases contain a sampling of the material that will be included and the themes to be addressed.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.144.124.232 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1]
 WINGS_170405_01.JPG
|
[2]
WINGS_170405_05.JPG
|
[3]
WINGS_170405_09.JPG
|
[4] WINGS_170405_11.JPG
|
[5]
WINGS_170405_16.JPG
|
[6]
WINGS_170405_18.JPG
|
[7]
WINGS_170405_31.JPG
|
[8] WINGS_170405_33.JPG
|
[9]
WINGS_170405_36.JPG
|
[10] WINGS_170405_39.JPG
|
[11]
WINGS_170405_41.JPG
|
[12]
WINGS_170405_46.JPG
|
[13]
WINGS_170405_48.JPG
|
[14] WINGS_170405_51.JPG
|
[15] WINGS_170405_54.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- WINGS_170405_01.JPG: Letters With Wings:
The Dream of Airmail, 1918-1938
In 2018, the National Postal Museum will celebrate the 100th anniversary of regularly scheduled airmail by presenting a special exhibition tentatively titled "Letters With Wings".
These cases contain a sampling of the material that will be included and the themes to be addressed.
- WINGS_170405_05.JPG: Pilots
Pilot Eddie Gardner poses with a Curtiss JN-4H "Jenny" mail plane in leather leggings, helmet, and goggles. Heavy gear was required year-round to protect pilots from the elements. They routinely flew at altitudes of 5,000-8,000 feet in open cockpits.
Photograph of airmail pilot Eddie Gardner, c 1918
- WINGS_170405_09.JPG: Thompson died in a mail crash on September 27, 1923, fifteen months after his last entry.
Pilot Harwell Thompson's log book, January 29, 1918 - June 17, 1922
- WINGS_170405_16.JPG: Promotion
During the early years of airmail service, many Americans remained unconvinced that it was worth the added cost relative to ordinary postage rates. Advertising images such as this one depicting letters raking flight helped promote airmail service as efficient and modern.
Advertising poster, c 1949-1958
- WINGS_170405_18.JPG: From May 15-31, 1938 Postmaster General James A. Farley and he nation celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the first airmail flights with National Airmail Week. Congratulatory messages poured in to postal headquarters from all over the country, all of them flown by air. National Air Mail Week was intended to demonstrate that the service was no longer experimental, but had instead become the backbone of the American mail system.
James A. Farley with National Air Mail Week letters, 1938
- WINGS_170405_31.JPG: Letters with Wings
The Dream of Airmail, 1918-1938
In less than two decades, the Post Office Department developed airmail from an experimental service into a profitable business an, in the process, laid the foundations of today's civilian airline industry. By 1938, the airmail network's spanned the entire country and extended to more than three dozen foreign countries.
In 2018 the National Postal Museum will celebrate the 100th anniversary of regularly scheduled airmail by presenting a special exhibition tentatively titled "Letters With Wings." These cases contain a sampling of the material than will be included and the themes to be addressed.
- WINGS_170405_36.JPG: Airmail Envelopes
Red- and blue-bordered airmail envelopes were introduced on August 1, 1928 in response to customer complaints that some airmail letters were not being conveyed by plane. Postal clerks who sorted thousands of envelopes an hour did not always notice airmail postage, and the patriotic border was intended to catch their eye. The officially approved design featured shapes that are variously described in period documents as diamonds, lozenges, and parallelograms. This was not a requirement, however, and many colorful and striking variations can be found, such as these checkerboard and sawtooth patterns.
- WINGS_170405_41.JPG: This letter survived an airmail plane crash at Marquette, Nebraska in February 1928 and was delivered.
Airmail wreck cover, 1928
- WINGS_170405_46.JPG: The United States issued this stamp to mark the Graf Zeppelin's 1933 visit to the Chicago World's Fair, and many copies were used to send souvenir mail on the flight.
50c "Graf Zeppelin" die proof, 1933
- WINGS_170405_48.JPG: Airmail Stamps
A transcontinental system of lighted airway beacons made night airmail possible in the 1920s. The Post Office Department issued a red and blue stamp depicting one of these beacons, located in Wyoming's Rocky Mountains, on July 25, 1928.
5c Beacon on Rocky Mountains plate proofs, 1928
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
