The Trouble with the Mail Boat
Residents are fed up with the 'notoriously bad' mail service between Kennewick and Richland.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Richland, Jan. 20—Last Monday on the up-trip of the mail boat, the Hanford Flyer, only newspaper bags were dropped off here. On the down trip, the letter bags appeared, but having no destination tag, they were carried to the end of the route and sent back. This means a person on the rural route might wait until Tuesday to get mail that arrived in Kennewick on Saturday—only ten or twelve miles away on a fine auto road. This is not the first time; the mail service for this district is notoriously bad. With upwards of 1,000 people to serve, it seems they are entitled to something better.
“It would mean further delay that if his letter got to Kennewick last Saturday forenoon any time after 7:30 o’clock he would not get such letter... till the next Tuesday about noon!”
Before the Tri-Cities were fully connected by highways and bridges, the river mail boat was a lifeline. Complaints about service reliability are a perennial feature of rural-to-urban transit, serving as a reminder of how distance was measured in days rather than minutes just a century ago.
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