Early US Postal Service

[Shnozzola]

In January 1913, one Ohio couple took advantage of the U.S. Postal Service's new parcel service to make a very special delivery: their infant son. The Beagues paid 15 cents for his stamps and an unknown amount to insure him for $50, then handed him over to the mailman, who dropped the boy off at his grandmother's house about a mile away.

Regulations about what you could and couldn't send through the mail were vague when post offices began accepting parcels over four pounds on January 1, 1913. People immediately started testing its limits by mailing eggs, bricks, snakes and other unusual "packages." So were people allowed to mail their children? Technically, there was no postal regulation against it.

In the case of May Pierstorff, whose parents sent her to her grandparent's house 73 miles away in February 1914, the postal worker who took her by Railway Mail train was a relative. The Idaho family paid 53 cents for the stamps they put on their nearly six-year-old daughter's coat. Yet after Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson heard about this incident—as well as another inquiry someone had made that month about mailing children—he officially banned postal workers from accepting humans as mail.

Still, the new regulation didn't immediately stop people from sending their children by post. A year later, a woman mailed her six-year-old daughter from her home in Florida to her father's home in Virginia. At 720 miles, it was the longest postal trip of any of the children Pope has identified, and cost 15 cents in stamps.

https://www.history.com/news/mailing-children-post-office

[kevin]

ive seen mouse mailers.

it was an envelope made of hardware cloth and stuffed full of aspen shavings-- the old excelsior packing material. you filled it with the shavings, put in half an apple, dropped in a mouse and then stapled it shut.

put a label on it and gave it to the postman.

[Meat]

Booze was mailed illegally up to Akutan Island all the time. My roommate got a notice from someone official that his package had been broken in Anchorage, booze! He ignored the notice. 

[kevin]

i knew a mustelid biologist who told me that one of his buddies had a deal with a canadian trapper to supply him with fresh wolverine uteruses so he could study implantation.

apparently the trapper would just drop the uteruses into a box, label it, and give it to th epost office when he was in town.

after a few ordinary scheduled deliveries, the post office began to pay attention and these boxes of raw fresh guts would go all the way from nowhere canada to the man's door down here in america in about 24 hours.