The Senate Post Office Playground

While Great-Grandpa Clifford was a medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. in the late 1940s, he worked incredibly early shifts, "starting at 0200," at the Senate Post Office. He had secured the job with the help of Arizona Senator Ernest W. McFarland, who was a very good friend of his father, Great-Great-Grandpa George. Dad later noted, with dry humor, "that political patronage from a Democrat played a big role in choosing the stage for a major part of my life".

For a young boy, getting to tag along was a major event. Dad wrote, "On very special occasions, they permitted me to get up early and go down with Dad to the Senate Post Office. This was an incredible treat, which I always looked forward to with delight".

Dad loved the energy of the place, noting that "watching Dad and his co-workers feverishly sort and deliver the mail was fun". He suspected there was a reason for their rushing, pointing out that "they also played the occasional card game, so maybe they were rushing so hard so that they could get finished and play". Since the clerks were "mainly law and medical students," Dad figured "maybe that was the only recreation that they got".

He didn't just watch, though. He got to pitch in. "They sometimes even permitted me to help stack the mail in the oversized, bin-like canvas carts used to lug it to the various offices," he remembered. Best of all, "When the stacking was over, they officially authorized me to ride around on the stack of mail in the cart".

When he wasn't riding the carts, the post office doubled as a fantastic playground. He wrote extensively about the tactile treasures he found on the desks: "There were also many rubber stamps (with red, blue and black ink pads), the old hand-cranked adding machines with their marvelous ability to produce long snakes of tape, huge, noisy black typewriters, and fascinatingly powerful hole punches".

He was particularly delighted by those hole punches, discovering that the "little metal boxes on their undersides... could pry off to obtain thousands of little white paper disks". He found endless entertainment with the "multitudinous white hole reinforcers that looked like flat little doughnuts, rulers of many sizes, bottles and jars of mucilage and glue". To a little boy's ultimate satisfaction, he discovered that "the little paper disks fit perfectly inside the reinforcers!".

But the absolute peak of the experience came when the work was done. "I even got to ride, almost every time I helped, in the Senate subway," Dad reminisced. "That was a huge, much begged-for treat".

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Back at home, Great-Grandpa Clifford "spent countless hours studying at his desk in their upstairs bedroom". When Dad interrupted him with questions, he was usually patient: "Most of the time, however, he would spend many hours, happy ones for me, at least, answering my questions, showing me things in his books and letting me play with the medical student's half skeleton, which was kept in a wooden box under his desk". Dad was, of course, "completely and particularly delighted with that skeleton, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its strange, musty smell". He remembered "thinking a lot about who the skeleton had been in life".