New Wooden Mail Cars
Make Nine Babies Orphans

New Wooden Mail Car Makes 9 Baby Orphans
Washington, D. C., Feb. 6 - This is a story about four men who lost their lives, and about nine little children who would have been happy last Christmas eve, and about grieving widows - and it all happened because Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock's feelings are so tender toward the railroads.
On June 1, 1910, a new law went into effect that postal cars must have certain "standard specifications," that, is that postal cars in the future must be safe - for it is a ntoorious fact that postal clerks by the score have lost their lives because the rickety old cars in which they have been compelled to work are always smashed into kindling wood when such cars meet with an accident.
On July 30, 1910, the Norfolk & Western railroad put a new postal car into service; A Wooden Car - which has been passed by Hitchcock's agents as answering the safety test and requirements.
On Dec. 24, 1910, five months later - J. R. Herndon, L. W. Dowdy and C. C. Goode were instantly killed and O. M. Bell was so badly injured that he died two hours after this very car had been smashed to small pieces because it left the track in tunnel No. 6 in the West Virginia mountains.
These men were all railway mail clerks.
No one else on the rain was injured - the postal clerks would in all likelihood not have been injuried if the car in which they worked had been made of steel, according to the intent of the law.
Nine children called in vain for their dead papas on Christmas eve.
Twenty-seven other railway mail clerks - making 31 in all - were killed during 1910, 100 more or less maimed for life and 617 more suffered injuries. Nearly all this death and agony would have been saved had steel mail cars beein inuse. The old wooden cars placed between steel engines and steel passenger coaches crush like eggs in every wreck.
These grim facts, together with a package of vivid statistics on unsanitary and death-trap cars hurled at congress by Editor Urban A. Walter of the Harpoon, and a storm of public protest, have at last secured action in the house. A resolution has passed providing that an agitation against cigar box postal cars in which Uncle Sam's postal clerks must risk their lives if they would earn a living; and this agitation makes this belated Christmas eve story timely and good, for on account of it the house of representatives has adopted a resolution which provides that after June 1916, no more wooden rattle-trap postal cars shall be run on the railroads to kill postal clerks and make sad widows and rob babies of their papas, perhaps on Christmas eve. The railroads set over three years in which to make the change, even now, though it should have been made years ago.
The house having taken this course, the senate will hardly dare do otherwise than act favorably on the bill - though it must be acknowledged that the senate dares much.
If the senate concurs even a Hitchcock having tender feelings for the railroads cannot long prevent installation of strong steel cars to safeguard the men int he railway mail service.
(The Tacoma Times, February 6, 1911, page 8)