When: closing May 27, 2019
Since the trip to the Postal Museum is a long one for me, involving a Metro ride, rather than a couple of blocks of walking, I try to see several shows at once. I saw this one the same day that I took in the one on stamps with flowering plants, and it was a rather incongruous pairing. As my previous post described, the flowering stamps show was a relaxing trip into the garden, a way to retreat from winter into a philatelic springtime. The early years of air mail was a frequently lethal trip into the skies.
1918 marked the first air mail delivery in the United States. As perilous a journey as the Pony Express doubtless was, flying mail from one city to another appears to have been even more dangerous. Starting on the East Coast, on a DC - Philadelphia - New York City route, by 1920, there was a New York City - San Francisco route. Of the 200 pilots used to fly the planes, 34 were killed on the job. There was no navigation as we know it today; the pilots depended on rivers and train tracks to determine their location. In bad weather, when visibility would have been minimal, there was no way to know where you were. One of the actual planes used is on display (hanging from the ceiling), and it looks pretty rickety.
If you go to see this show, note that it's not in the Franklin Foyer, as the website indicates. It's on Level 1, in the "Networking a Nation" area.
Verdict: Probably not worth a trip all on its own (unless you're a postal history enthusiast), but if you're there anyway, give it a look.
No comments:
Post a Comment