Saturday 17th October 2009 - Another Bit of Luck, Maybe

          I need to make a phone call, so, as usual, I have to run up-and-down the main roads   in-and-out of town.  I suspect this would be true of whichever provider I was using.  As soon as I move off the interstates, there are problems.  I guess if you're moving to small-town America, you wait till you get there before you buy a phone.  Although if I'd done that I should think I'd now have a phone for every network.  But I don't really need a phone at all, so I never get round to sorting this out.

 

          I've been trying to find out a little about local politicians at the time Glasgow got its post office.  Governors only seemed to serve for two years, but the one who was in office at the time was the son of an Irish immigrant.  I wonder if that's significant.  Curiously, being governor seemed to be a kind of career: they sometimes went off and became governor somewhere else.

          Anyway, I caught a snippet in a Post Office history site that suggested it was really down to the local congressman.  There were movements afoot even then to try to make postmaster appointments non-political.  One commentator suggested that when you went to a party convention, almost everybody there worked for the Post Office.

          Somewhat surprisingly, the congessman of the time was a whig.  I didn't know they had survived the revolution.  Congessmen also served for only two years.

 

          The I found out something quite surprising: The American Postal History Society has its annual meeting at the end of the month.  And they're meeting at the American Philatelic Center in Bellefonte, PA, which is about twenty miles from the Glasgow after next.  It's a small world, isn't it?