Someone whom I’ve known since elementary school celebrated his fiftieth birthday this week. On July 1, Mr. ZIP reached the half-century mark. His invention brought efficiency changes to the U.S.

Sure, there are some other celebrities who were born in 1963 (Brad Pitt, perhaps? Johnny Depp? How about Michael Jordan?) who have more name recognition, but none of them send you letters every day.

Most kids I knew didn’t worry a lot about weirdo strangers bothering us in an early 1960s version of Nashua, especially if we stayed clear of certain neighborhoods our parents liked to call “rough” or ...

The ZIP Code was launched 60 years ago this month as part of a program of improvements to increase postal delivery speed. At the time, Americans were already struggling to adapt to three-digit area ...

On July 1, 1963, the U.S. Post Office Department introduced the ZIP code program to get a handle on the heaping surplus of mail. Today, those five digits represent much more for American society. Back ...

Mr. ZIP, informally "Zippy", was a cartoon character used in the 1960s by the United States Post Office Department, and later by its successor, the United States Postal Service, to encourage the ...

Mr. ZIP is turning 50 on Monday, July 1. On July 1,1963, the Postal Service adopted the popular cartoon figure as the trademark for the Zoning Improvement Plan, or ZIP Code, to better handle ...

Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from ...

Previously on You’ve Got Mail, we looked at a few services that were designed to speed up the mail at various points along the way. But these improvements were all taking place on the USPS’ side of ...