A First Look Back At My Scrap Book Project

What is this all about do you think?

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Age of Innocence – 1963, US ZIP Codes and X-RAY Specs

As a teenager I used to read American superhero comics like DC and Marvel and I was always tempted to respond to the full page advertisements for such things as a complete two hundred piece civil war army for $1.49, a miniature secret camera for only $1.00 or a free Charles Atlas body building course.

What prevented me filling in the order form and sending off the cash was not the rather critical fact that I had no idea how to exchange my paper round money into dollars but rather the fact that I didn’t know what a ZIP code was.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Foreign

The U.S. Postal Service ZIP Code…

The ZIP code is the system of postal codes used by the United States Postal Service.  The letters ZIP are an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan and were chosen to suggest that the mail travels more efficiently, and therefore more quickly, when senders use it.  By the early 1960s improvements were needed in the postal service due to increasing volumes and on 1^st July 1963 ZIP codes were announced for the whole country.  This might not sound like a really big issue but I mention it because for many years I had a lot of difficulty understanding what a ZIP code was as post codes were not introduced to the whole of the United Kingdom until over ten years later in 1974.

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