Fifty days, fifty dorky little postcards. Happy 50th, COVID Cards!

In the first half of the 20th century, the amount of mail going through the postal service grew rapidly. In the 50s, things started getting out of hand. The Chicago Post Office — the largest in the world with a whopping 60 acres of floor space — had a 10 million piece back up. Speaking to a House subcommittee to address the issue, the Postmaster General said:

At the peak of the crisis in Chicago, ten million pieces of mail were logjammed. The sorting room floors were bursting with more than 5 million letters, parcels, circulars, and magazines that could not be processed. Outbound mail sacks formed small grey mountain ranges while they waited to be shipped out.

Our new and beleaguered Chicago postmaster summed it up pretty well when he said: “We had mail coming out of our ears.” (source)