The good ol’days off asters nail mail

DEAR EDITOR:

In the 1930s, when I was a young boy, I accompanied my father to the post office in Watrous, Sask. It was his practice to write his mother every week in Victoria on Sunday. It was read by her in Victoria within three days.

Sorting mail was done in the mail car while the steam engine pulled the train on the main line of the CNR. It was sorted while the train moved, and transferred in Vancouver to the Cunard ship, the Princess Margaret, or any other arriving in the Victoria inner harbour, ready for a carrier going to grandma’s home on Austin Ave.

She read the letter from my father on the third day.

It took just three days at the cost of three cents for first-class mail (second-class was two cents).

What has happened to our postal system? We pay well over a dollar for a letter to be mailed within Canada, yet service is so poor that a letter to somebody five blocks away will not reach that person for at least two weeks, as it must be trucked to Vancouver for sorting, then returned to Kelowna and delivered to the address.

We pride ourselves that we are living in an advanced age, yet my granddaughter in Seattle reports that her aunt in Yellowknife didn’t receive a letter until 45 days after it was mailed, and mine to my daughter in Yellowknife was mailed four weeks ago and she is still waiting to receive it, while my son in the Winnipeg area waited three weeks for a similar letter from Kelowna.

Are we back to using oxen, donkeys, or dogs to pull little wagons in summer (or sleds in the winter)? Is this what we call progress? W.N. Morris

Kelowna