National Postal Museum

Omaha Train Robbery: May 22, 1909

By: Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

In the dark of the night around 11pm Union Pacific’s Overland Limited train was stopped just south of Omaha, Nebraska by a pair of men holding pistols and wearing handkerchief masks. When the train stopped, another pair appeared and demanded the mail clerks open up the door to the mail car. They refused and one of the thieves shot out a window in the car door. The Railway Post Office clerks complied with the order, opening the door. The thieves took seven registered mail pouches from the train, sending the clerks and the train back on their way, ordering the engineer to return the train to the Omaha station. The registered mail pouches were destined for New York, Chicago and Washington, DC.

Some clues began to pop up in the area, including empty mail pouches and a greasy glove near Union Pacific railroad tracks. Mail clerk M.C. Rush was able to describe one of the thieves, whose mask slipped a bit, as being smooth shaven and with light hair. Postal inspectors, including several from the Kansas City, Missouri office, joined Union Pacific and local detectives at the scene. The railroad offered $20,000 for the arrest and conviction of the four bandits (officials would later learn there were five thieves in all) and the Post Office Department offered $4,000. Postal officials did not release an estimated value of the stolen mail, but it was later determined to be worth $500-$700.

Five days after the robbery, some boys from Brown Park Elementary school were playing in some brush when they found two guns, handkerchiefs and hats hidden away. Police were notified, and kept the area under watch, in case the thieves would return. Three of them did. Donald Woods, Fred Torgensen and James Gordon (real name Frank Grigward) were taken into custody as the investigation proceeded. Another critical clue was found when one gun was test fired and found to have made the same indentation on a shell as some found at the robbery. The Brown Park school made it back in the news when janitors discovered the rest of the mail pouches in the attack on May 28, emptied of all valuables. Further investigations added two more men to the jail’s population and by the fall of 1909 all were put on trial for the robbery.

On November 11, 1909, after just over an hour of deliberations, the jury found all five men guilty of the robbery. They were delivered to Leavenworth prison, but that wasn’t the end of the story. On April 1910, Grigware and five other prisoners escaped from Leavenworth. Most of the prisoners were rounded up shortly after their escape. But not Grigware. The search for him continued. Unknown to his pursuers, Grigware had changed his name to James Fahey and found work first in Minnesota, then in Canada, where he set up residence, marrying a Canadian woman and starting a family in Alberta. Grigware/Fahey might have continued life without discovery, but he was arrested for hunting fox out of season in 1934. His fingerprints were forwarded to Ottawa and then Washington, DC (the FBI’s International Fingerprint Exchange program had just begun two years earlier).  His friends and neighbors, and even Canadian officials, defended the man they knew as Fahey, and US officials decided not to demand his extradition.

Mug shot of Frank Grigward (aka James Gordon)

Omaha newspaper report after mail pouches were found in a school attic. Shown were the suspects already under arrest at the time, Donald Woods (whose real name was Dan Downer), Fred Torgensen and James Gordon (whose real name was Frank Grigward).

Hindenburg Passenger Ticket

By Cheryl R. Ganz, Philately Department

May 6, 2013: 76th Anniversary of Hindenburg Disaster

Burtis J. “Bert” Dolan’s passenger ticket survived the final flight and disaster of the German zeppelin Hindenburg. Through the courtesy of the Burtis J. Dolan family archive, the ticket is now on exhibit in the Smithsonian National Postal Museum exhibition Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic. The ticket, #2398, was purchased from the Zeppelin operating company only two days before the May 3, 1937, departure from Frankfurt, Germany, and signed by Captain Ernst Lehmann, who perished after the crash landing. The ticket cost was 1,000 RM, equivalent to about $450 during the Great Depression. This is possibly the only surviving passenger ticket from that final flight.

Business colleagues from Chicago, Dolan, an executive in the perfume business, and Nelson Morris, an executive in the meatpacking industry, had crossed paths in Nice, France, during their spring 1937 business trips in Europe. Morris convinced Dolan to change his travel plans. Rather than return home by sea, why not travel on the Hindenburg, which was making its first trip of the season? A faster trip would allow Dolan to surprise his family with an early return for Mothers Day. Morris paid the additional costs over ocean liner travel for Dolan’s zeppelin ticket, and Dolan paid Morris’s Hindenburg bar tab just before the landing.

On May 6, 1937, at 7:24 p.m. local Lakehurst time, Dolan and Morris stood side by side at the Hindenburg’s starboard promenade windows (near the reading and writing room) to watch the landing crew grab the ropes and moor the great zeppelin. One minute later, a jolt shook the passenger cabin. The two friends grasped a post to stay on their feet as the Hindenburg’s bow surged upwards. Panicked, they jumped from a window, first Morris and then Dolan. Morris later recalled, “The most remarkable thing that I know in my life, I took metal rods an inch thick in my hands and I broke them. They broke like paper.” After clearing the wreckage, he turned and looked back for Dolan, but did not see him. Dolan perhaps paused to help someone at the window before running clear. In so doing, he was caught in the tangle of burning girders that surrounded him. He died in the disaster, leaving a widow, Mildred, and four children, who did not even know he had been aboard. Dolan’s body was identified by his passport and passenger ticket in his pocket, and he was still holding the rosary given to him by his wife.

The family learned of Dolan’s Hindenburg passage from Nelson Morris’s brother Edward, who shared the secret. Shocked, the family anxiously followed the news. They received the devastating confirmation from a priest who had performed last rites. Recovered, burnt items from Dolan’s body were returned to the family, including his passport, ticket, and the invoice for Morris’s onboard expenses and two telegrams. Dolan had written a letter to his wife, which was in an unfranked envelope addressed to her marked “strictly personal.” In the touching and emotional letter he told his wife of his personal conflict in flying against her wishes and that should anything happen enroute, “None of us know the Lord’s will.”

Read more: Dennis Kromm, “Homecoming,” The Zeppelin Collector (July 1988) 59-63. »

 

Burtis J. Dolan’s passenger ticket salvaged from the final flight and disaster of the German zeppelin Hindenburg, May 6, 1937. Courtesy of the Dolan family archives.

 

 

Salvaged passport of deceased passenger Burtis J. “Bert” Dolan. Courtesy of the Dolan family archives.

 

 

Burtis J. Dolan’s family members visit the Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic exhibition and view the portrait of family friend Nelson Morris. Left to right: granddaughter Mary Alice and great grandsons Matthew, Timothy, and Brian.

Learn more about the Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic exhibition.

 

The Great Kipton Train Wreck

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

On April 18, 1891, near Kipton station, 40 miles west of Cleveland, Ohio, the fast mail train #14 collided with the Toledo Express. The fast mail was running at full speed, and the Toledo express was almost at a spot where it would traditionally pull over on a siding to let the fast mail pass. The massive collision killed nine men, six of them postal clerks working on the fast mail train.

A line of freight cars and the station itself may have impaired the vision of the engineer of the fast mail train. He apparently applied his breaks as soon as he saw the Toledo express on the road, but it was too little, too late. According to one newspaper report, “The engine of the Toledo express was knocked squarely across the track, and that of the fast mail reared in the air, resting on the top of the other. The fast mail consisted of three mail cars and two parlor cars, and the Toledo express of five coaches and two baggage cars. The first and second mail cars were telescoped and smashed to kindling wood, and the third crashed into the first two and rolled over on the station platform, breaking the windows of the building.” (1)

The Railway Mail Service clerks killed in the wreck were all from Ohio. They were Frank Nugent of Toledo, J.L. Clement of Cleveland, James McKinley of Conneaut, and Charles Hammil, John J. Bowerfield, and Charles L. McDowell, all of Elyria.  This horrific wreck, which made headlines across the country, brought the dangers of serving as a railway mail clerk home to the nation. In the weeks following the wreck, newspapers and magazines produced a number of stories highlighting the lives and work of railway mail clerks. The Post Office Department emphasized the wreck in their continuing calls for railway companies to produce steel mail cars instead of wooden ones which provided little protection for clerks in collisions.

Investigators determined that the Toledo express crew was at fault. Their train was late and should not have started out for Kipton, knowing that the fast mail was approaching on the same line. The investigation centered on the engineer’s watches, one of which was possibly four minutes slow. A mere four minutes was the difference between life and death on the line.

The General Superintendent of the line in question, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, appointed Cleveland, Ohio jeweler Webster Ball to investigate time keeping issues on the line. Ball’s investigation resulted in the establishment of watch performance and inspection standards in 1893.

At Kipton, wooden mail cars offered little protection for the clerks working inside.

Remnants of train cars at Kipton following the collision.

An historical marker at Kipton tells the story of the tragic wreck of 1891.

One of dozens of headline articles about the wreck.

  
 (1) “A Horror of the Rail,” The Atlanta Constitution, April 19, 1891, page 19.

Remembering the Titanic

By Daniel Piazza, Philately Department

This year’s anniversary of Titanic’s sinking is a pretty low-key affair. Last year was the centenary, and there were hundreds of commemorations all over the world that garnered a lot of media attention. Everyone is interested in a hundredth anniversary, but a hundred-and-first somehow does not seem as important.

A crowd will gather at the Washington, D.C. Titanic memorial, as they do every year, but it will be a fraction of the three to four hundred who showed up last year at midnight.

If you don’t want to venture to the Southeast waterfront, you can instead come to the National Postal Museum and see original sketches of the memorial by its sculptor, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, on loan to us from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

 

Loan from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Even if you have viewed Fire & Ice before, a number of new pieces were installed in January that make it worth a second look. The National Archives in New York has loaned us a manual of ship’s regulations that once belonged to Titanic survivor and White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay. Published in 1907, the book was standard issue on all ships belonging to the International Mercantile Marine Co., including Titanic. We have opened it to the page dealing with “Custody of the Mails.”

 

 

Loan from National Archives and Records Administration (New York)

One of the most famous radio transmissions of all time is memorialized on this Marconi company form from Olympic’s radio room. At 1:13 a.m., one hour and forty minutes after striking an iceberg, Titanic tells Olympic, “We are putting the passengers off in small boats.” This was one of the last intelligible messages sent by Titanic. “N.Y.T.” stands for “New York Time,” which Second Officer Charles Lightoller reckoned was 1 hour and 33 minutes behind Titanic’s time.

 

On loan from Dr. Edward and Joanne Dauer.

Chicago physician Frank Blackmarr, a passenger aboard Carpathia when that ship received Titanic’s distress signals, assisted the ship’s surgeon treating survivors. He collected numerous relics of the disaster, including the autographs and addresses of Titanic’s four surviving officers. The autographs, from top to bottom, are: Fourth Officer James Graves Boxhall; Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller; and Fifth Officer Harold Godfrey Lowe. Third Officer Herbert John Pitman signed on a separate sheet (not shown).

 

 

Loan from Brian, Maria, and Alexander Green

So, even though the “big anniversary” is behind us, a visit to Fire & Ice at the National Postal Museum is a new opportunity to learn about the disaster and reflect on the enormity of Titanic’s loss.    

 

What’s that Whishing Sound?

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

America’s postal service went underground 120 years ago today. No, it wasn’t on the run or trying to be a 19th century “hipster.” It was the first US postal use of a series of underground pneumatic tubes, using six-inch iron water pipes to carry mail underground between post offices and railway stations. Powered by pressurized air, canisters would fly between stations at 30 mph. Philadelphia started the trend with a tube line that connected the central post office at 9th and Market Streets with a railway station four blocks away at 24th and Chestnut Street (the post office still stands, but the train station was torn down in the 1960s). 

Mail sent through the tubes moved between the stations in just two minutes, compared to 15 minutes the trip usually took by wagon. In attendance was Postmaster General John Wanamaker, who had made certain that the first test of the service would be in his hometown of Philadelphia. He placed a Bible wrapped in an American flag (1) into a tube that went flying out with a loud whish! Only a few minutes later the tube, with contents, was sent back on a return trip. The experiment had been a success. Postal officials and workers continued testing the tubes with a decreasingly iconic collection of items including postcards, newspapers, a pair of shoes, a loaf of bread, oranges, apples, a bunch of violets, and a laundered shirt.

Pneumatic tube receiver and transmitter machine at the Philadelphia post office.

Wanamaker was wary of the potential cost of building and operating the service, so the Post Office Department contracted with private companies to build and maintain the tubes, and then paid an annual rent of $3,450 for using them. In Philadelphia the tubes were constructed and owned by the Electric Pneumatic Transit Company. Payment for the service at first came from the appropriations assigned to the mail messenger service.

The Philadelphia service was followed a few years later by pneumatic tube construction and use in New York City, Boston, and Brooklyn. The first line in New York City was run between the main city post office and a branch office in the Produce Exchange and was operated by the Tubular Dispatch Company, not quite 4,000 feet away. While a wagon could carry dozens of mailbags between the two offices, the busy streets slowed wagons. But a pneumatic canister could carry 600 letters at once below the streets, making the same trip in a minute and 30 seconds. Chicago and St. Louis also used pneumatic tube mail service, but in neither city did the service obtain the reach and viability that it had did on the East Coast.

This pneumatic canister is on display in the museum’s “Customers and Communities” exhibit. It was used in the last years of the service, in New York City in the early 1950s.

One of the most intriguing pneumatic tube routes wasn’t underground at all. In fact it ran between the Brooklyn and New York City main post offices across the Brooklyn Bridge. The 1.65 mile route was built and operated by the New York Mail & Newspaper Transportation Company after a couple of years of debate, court-ordered work stoppages and other delays. It operated from August 1, 1898 to April 28, 1950 when it was removed for construction on the bridge but never restored. This pneumatic tube service operated from 5am to 9pm Monday through Saturday, carrying 126,350 letters and 20,250 newspapers each day. The Department paid an annual rent of $14,000 for the service, which used cast iron tubes 8 3/16” in diameter. The tubes allowed mail that traveled by wagons in 30 minutes to speed across the bridge in 3 ½ minutes. By 1898 the system connected 21 local post offices in Manhattan to the main post office. As late as 1914, 30-percent of first-class letters sent through the city's main post office were transmitted by pneumatic tube.

Unidentified postal worker next to a piece of equipment that sorts and sends tubes off through different pneumatic tubes in the system.

By 1918 the Post Office Department began replacing its horse-drawn wagons with automobiles, which carried mail between railway stations and post offices even more rapidly than the pneumatic tube system. During World War I, the Post Office Department suspended the service to conserve funding for the war effort. After the war, it restored the service, but while post offices and business centers moved with relative ease, the underground pneumatic system did not. New York City continued using a portion of the pneumatic tube service into the 1950s, but by then it was basically obsolete. The Post Office Department suspended it in 1953, pending review, but never reinstated it.

Workers at a New York City post office loading and preparing pneumatic canisters for the tubes.

(1) Wanamaker sent a message with the package reading, “First use of the pneumatic postal tube in the United States is to send through it a copy of the Holy Scriptures, the greatest message ever given to the world. Covering the Bible is the American flag, the emblem of freedom of 65,000,000 happy people.”

 

Zeppelin Hindenburg Passenger Visits Fire & Ice Exhibit

In memory of the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, Dr. Horst Schirmer, one of the airship’s passengers, visited NPM’s special exhibition, Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic. Dr. Schirmer, a physician at Johns Hopkins, was only six years old when he flew on a Hindenburg test flight to evaluate a new propeller design. His father, Dr. Max Schirmer, had been one of the zeppelin’s technical designers and flew on many zeppelin flights. He was a wind tunnel expert who studied aerodynamics during the era that streamlining emerged as the cutting edge technology.

Dr. Schirmer toured the exhibition with Dr. Cheryl Ganz, Chief Curator of Philately. He remarked that “the one word he would use to describe the exhibit is fantastic!" He was impressed by how a fairly complicated story for a small space was arranged to flow, capturing how the individual passengers and the crew members became partners to survive the disaster. Below are some of his remarks. Compare them to your own impressions of the exhibit and the web story that accompanies Fire & Ice.

"The exhibit’s design to tell the story in way that would be relevant to a younger generation struck me as the most important aspect of your Fire & Ice exhibit. I was quite taken seeing how it brought the stories of the survivors to the front of the “stage,” primarily because I had never thought that way about the few that made it home. I found it very much thought-provoking."

"I had never really thought about a MAIL ROOM!  Much less THE mail room!  Where it was, how important it was (to the success of lighter than air travel), much less the complex process by which the mail was handled once it was on board. I certainly was aware that mail revenue was crucial to the operating finances, but I didn't realize how it all was accomplished!  The location of the mailroom above the control gondola was a complete surprise! This was all new to me, I admit!"

"My father would have been amazed at the interest shown today in what was his life and livelihood some 75-100 years ago. Those who worked on the zeppelins believed that they would change the way of the world, and Fire & Ice reveals how so much of that story has to do with the PEOPLE that made it happen. It wasn't just the machine."

 

Dr. Horst Schirmer recalls life aboard the German airship Hindenburg with curator Dr. Cheryl Ganz.

Dr. Horst Schirmer examines relics salvaged from the zeppelin Hindenburg’s wreckage after its disaster on May 6, 1937.

Delivering the Hope Diamond

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

On November 8, 1958, an employee of Harry Winston’s New York City jewelry store mailed an ordinary looking package at the mail city post office. The package was anything but ordinary. It held one of the most famous gems in America, the Hope Diamond. The employee paid $145.29 to mail the package. Postage accounted for only $2.44 of the total cost. The rest was for insurance totaling $1 million. This valuable gem traveled safe and sound to the museum through the US mail.

In Washington, the package was delivered by local letter carrier James G. Todd. He picked it up at the Washington, D.C. city post office, which today houses the National Postal Museum. It was a short trip to the Natural History Museum from here. There, Leonard Carmichael, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, brought Todd into the Gem Hall where reporters and cameras watched as Todd plucked the valuable package from his mail satchel and presented it to Secretary Carmichael.

Of course, much of the intrigue of the Hope Diamond comes from its alleged curse. At the donation ceremony Mrs. Winston scoffed at the idea of a curse, noting that her family had held the gem without any ill effects.  Carrier Todd had cause to question just how powerful the curse was. Within a single year after delivering the stone to the Smithsonian, Todd suffered a crushed leg and head wound in two separate automobile accidents, his wife died of a heart attack, his dog strangled on his leash, and Todd’s Seat Pleasant, Maryland, home was partially destroyed by fire.

When reached by a Washington Post reporter who asked if he attributed his misfortune to having delivered the Hope Diamond, Todd replied, “I don’t believe any of that stuff.” He went on to say that it was all in one’s attitude. Referring to the fire he said: “Perhaps I’m actually having good luck. Thank God all four children were outside instead of in those rooms.” Todd added a thought. “If the hex is supposed to affect the owners, then the public should be having the bad luck.”


As visitors to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum know, the Hope Diamond is still on display at that museum today. And while that museum got to keep the diamond, the National Postal Museum is home to the unique package wrapper (above) used to bring it to the Smithsonian.


Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image ID: SIA2010-0338
From left to right: Ronald Winston, son of jeweler Harry Winston, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, Secretary Carmichael, letter carrier James G. Todd, Harry’s wife Edna, and Secretary Carmichael at the National Museum of Natural History.

 

The Flying Post Office

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

By the mid 20th century the Post Office Department’s Railway Mail Service (RMS) had been moving and processing mail across the country for almost a century. The service had long shown that having men sort mail while on board moving trains helped speed mail service. But by the end of the Second World War, train service was declining, taking the railway mail train cars with it. More and more mail was being moved aboard aircraft.

Postal officials wondered if there was a way of taking the sorting expertise of the men riding the RMS trains and combining it with the speed of airplanes. The Post Office Department worked with a few airlines to put that combination in motion and the Flying Post Office was born.

Unfortunately, it was harder for clerks to stand and move in the airplane than on moving trains, and the amount of mail that could be sorted during those speedier airplane flights was too small to make the system practical. Interesting in theory, but useless in practice, the Flying Post Offices didn’t move beyond the experimental stage.

This is a proof for the cachet art used on envelopes carried on the October 1, 1946, American Airlines demonstration flight of the Flying Post Office. The art is labeled “DEMONSTRATION FLIGHT, FLYING POST OFFICE” above the sketch of an airplane in flight. Below the airplane are the words, “En route, Los Angeles, New York – Boston, U.S. AIR MAIL.” The American Airlines emblem is located below the nose of the airplane.

Interior of a Trans World Airlines (TWA) Skymaster aircraft equipped for onboard mail sorting and routing. The clerks on board this flight were (left to right, foreground), Melvin G. McBride, General Foreman, and Louis A. Dunn, Superintendent, from the Wilmington, Delaware, post office.

DeAutremont Brothers Train Robbery

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

The mail train car, following the explosion and subsequent fire.

Most people think of train robberies as a 19th century event, complete with Butch and Sundance blowing up a train car, or Jesse James and his gang taking on the evil railroad companies. But a violent and tragic train robbery attempt was made in 1923. On October 11 of that year, three men, twins Roy and Ray DeAutremont and their young brother Hugh ambushed Southern Pacific train #13 in southern Oregon, just as the train was emerging from a tunnel.

The detonator used by the brothers is now in the National Postal Museum.

The trio’s goal was $40,000 in gold they believed was being carried in the mail car. The car’s railway mail clerk, Elvyn Dougherty was in the secured mail car when the boys approached. Unable to force their way inside, they decided to blow the door open using dynamite and a detonator (left) they had stolen from a construction company.

The boys had no idea what they were doing and used far too much dynamite. The blast destroyed the car (above), killing clerk Dougherty and obliterating most of the mail. During their robbery the boys also shot and killed the train’s conductor, engineer, and fireman, not wanting to leave any witnesses. There was no gold and the three fled the scene with nothing. They managed to elude authorities for three years.

The brothers were eventually brought to justice after an extensive manhunt was rewarded in February 1927 with the arrest of Hugh DeAutremont. He had joined the army under the name James Price and was serving in the Philippines, where he was recognized by a barracks buddy. Hugh claimed he did not know where his brothers were, but his arrest revived media interest in the story and Ray and Roy were recognized and apprehended in Steubenville, Ohio, a few months later. They were living under the name of Goodwin. All three were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hugh DeAutremont received a parole in 1959 and died roughly two months later in San Francisco. Roy was given a frontal lobotomy while in prison and was paroled in March, 1983. He died three months later in a nursing home. Ray was paroled in 1961 and died on December 22, 1984 in Eugene after working for years as a custodian at the University of Oregon.

Wanted posters announced the $15,900 bounty on the brothers. Posters were distributed across the U.S.

Dangers of Flying the Mail

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

Among other accomplishments, the Post Office Department set the stage for the successful development of commercial aviation in America. From 1918-1926 the Department operated the nation’s airmail service, buying aircraft, determining flyways, organizing airports, and of course, hiring pilots. While fewer than 250 pilots were hired during those years, thousands of young men applied to be an airmail pilot.

It may seem hard to believe that so many men wanted a job that had such a high fatality rate. During the 1918-1926 period, thirty-five men died flying the mail. The service gained an ominous nickname among the nation's aviators as a "suicide club" for flyers.

Frederick A. Robinson joined the airmail service on August 16, 1919. Before joining the service Robinson was a flying instructor at Rockwell Field in San Diego. His postal assignments included Belmont Park, New York (the first New York City airmail field), Newark and Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. On September 27, 1920, while flying from Hazelhurst Field to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, Robinson ran into trouble. Distance flying at the time required a sound knowledge of the area, as navigational aids consisted of following landmarks on the ground. Because of fog, Robinson was flying low over the Susquehanna River, using it as a guide. Near Millersburg, Pennsylvania, his landing gear struck a Cumberland Valley Telephone Company wire strung across the river. Robinson’s plane was hurled sharply into the river, landing upside down in the shallow water. Robinson died on impact. He was 24 years old.

Without the courage and determination of pilots such as Frederick Robinson, the nation’s airmail, and subsequently commercial aviation services could not have gotten off the ground.



This photograph of Robinson’s aircraft was viewed in newspapers across the U.S. after the crash.

 

Robinson’s mother received this terse, businesslike telegram from E.R. White, Acting 2nd Assistant Postmaster General, requesting her wishes for the disposition of her son’s body. Robinson’s body was forwarded by train to his mother’s home, accompanied by airmail pilot Randolph Page.