Postal innovation zips toward 40th anniversary

By BILL STRAUB
Scripps Howard News Service
June 19, 2003

- The man who helped transform the American postal system in the 1960s and became a smiling symbol of efficiency is about to turn 40. If you intend to send a card, be sure to include in the address the nine-digit code that bears his name.

On July 1, 1963, what was then the U.S. Post Office Department introduced the Zoning Improvement Plan - much better known today as the ZIP code. The surging volume of mail in the pre-FedEx era, coupled with the increasingly diverse delivery system of planes, trains and trucks, forced the famously obstinate system to adopt the new code, the first significant change in the postal delivery system since the advent of airmail in 1918.

And the man chosen to deliver the ZIP code sermon was none other than Mr. ZIP himself, a goggle-eyed, uniformed, cartoon letter carrier featured in television commercials and in the margins of postage-stamp sheets. As it turns out, Mr. ZIP became one of history's great salesmen, achieving what is now a ZIP code compliance rate of more than 95 percent.

The idea of a number code to improve delivery was not immediately embraced by Americans, who saw their individualities being quickly reduced to numbers, like the ones provided by the Social Security system. The changes came at about the same time that Ma Bell, as the AT&T telephone company was known then, switched from the old letter exchanges, such as PA6-5000, to the numeric exchanges of today. Editorial writers intoned about "numerical neurosis" and Big Brother.

But the U.S. Postal Service, which succeeded the Post Office Department when the system was privatized in 1971, insisted that the changes were necessary. The private correspondence that had dominated the system's labors since Benjamin Franklin took over as the nation's first postmaster general in 1775 had been supplanted by a flood of business mail. By 1963, business mail constituted 80 percent of the total volume, consisting of utility bills, bank statements, credit-card bills and other pieces.

The Post Office simply couldn't keep up. Sorting the mail, once performed at a leisurely pace on a train's mail car, had to be done at a quicker pace. So, in early 1963, the department adopted a coding system credited by most sources to Robert Moon, who began tinkering with the idea while serving as a postal inspector in Philadelphia and Chicago in the 1940s.

The final product was a fairly simple five-digit code. The first number designates a broad geographic area - the Northeast, for instance, is represented by a zero, while a 9 signifies the far West. The next two numbers pinpoint population concentrations within those wide population areas, usually a state or several smaller states grouped together, while the final two designate specific post offices or postal zones in large cities.

Postmaster General John Gronouski announced that the ZIP code would arrive on July 1, 1963. At first, attaching a ZIP code to a letter or package was optional. It only became a requirement for second- and third-class bulk mailers in 1967.

The ZIP code proved such a success that the postal service expanded on it in the early 1980s with the ZIP-Plus-4 program. Originally aimed at bulk and large-volume business mailers, the new program added four numbers to the original five digits to achieve even better delivery.

The heavy lifting involved in promoting the ZIP code was, of course, left to Mr. ZIP, whose job was to remind people throughout the country to include the codes when mailing letters and packages. Mr. ZIP was the creation of Harold Wilcox, with the advertising agency of Cunningham & Walsh. His father was a postman.

Mr. ZIP first appeared publicly on Jan. 10, 1964, on a block of 5-cent commemorative stamps honoring Sam Houston. Accompanying him were the words, "Use ZIP Code."

Mr. ZIP carried out his duties, through rain and snow and gloom of night, until being forced into retirement in 1986 by a new postal service hierarchy that considered him an "anachronism."

Basically, the old boy was a victim of his own success. He has retired to wherever it is that old advertising icons go. Probably Florida.

The two-letter abbreviations came along as part of the ZIP code numbering program introduced in 1963 by the U.S. Post Office, as it was known then, to help speed the delivery of mail.

The idea was to limit to 27 characters the city and state line of an address to accommodate postal electronic scanning devices. The shortened abbreviations helped do this.

They were intended for use only on mail, but postal officials did such a good job of promoting the abbreviations that people were influenced to use them for all purposes. We even see them on billboards and on signs painted on trucks.

"TN" replaced the long-standing "Tenn." for "Tennessee." Many have never quite grasped this; we see all sorts of incorrect variations, "Tn.," "TN.," "Tn" or even "T.N."

Ironically, the specially created abbreviations aren't required on mail anymore, except for mass mailers and special mail. Postal officials say, however, that the two-letter abbreviations are preferred. But the numbers, not the abbreviations, are the important part of the ZIP code.

Most people born after the ZIP code program went into effect think the abbreviations created by postal officials are the only correct ones.

I remember the surprise expressed by a 29-year-old lawyer a few years ago when I told him that "Tenn.," not "TN," was the proper abbreviation for Tennessee in most instances.

He said his grandmother used "Tenn.," but he figured it was just one of her old-time quirks.

Most dictionaries and stylebooks specify the standard state abbreviations that have been in use for years, then they list the two-letter abbreviations, generally with the added note, "for use with ZIP code."

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage advises against general use of the postal abbreviations, saying "some are hard to tell apart on quick reading."

Writer James J. Kilpatrick agrees. He once wrote, "I never can remember if MI is Michigan, Minnesota or Mississippi, so I will stick with Mich., Minn., and Miss."

Good advice for everyone.

C. Edwin Graves, Knoxville's postmaster when the ZIP code program was introduced, recalled a few weeks ago that postmasters were called to Washington for a briefing on the program before it was launched.

"They told us it was going to be shocking to the public and that we should try to reassure them that the mail wasn't going to pile up at the post office if the ZIP code wasn't on the letters," he said.

"Little by little, after two or three months, you could tell the difference. People were starting to put the ZIP code on their mail," Graves said.

Before then, the only number the public used in the last line of an address was between the city and state names. For example, the address on a letter for someplace in North Knoxville read: Knoxville 17, Tennessee.

In the ZIP code, the first digit designates a broad geographical area of the United States, ranging from 0 for the Northeast to 9 for the West Coast. The next two digits more closely pinpoint sectional centers of the postal system, and the last two digits are the zone numbers that were already in use. Thus, what was formerly zone 17 in Knoxville became 37917.

"ZIP code" is such a handy term that few ever stop to think about what "ZIP" stands for - Zone Improvement Plan.