We got a little sloppy yesterday. The guy who walked to New York for $1K? Didn’t make it. Fell 400 miles short, but also set a record which is why it was confusing at first glance.

So today? I just went with the absurd. The first thing that greeted me this morning was this:

Salesmen working out of Seattle are using carrier pigeons for business. One wholesale concern sends each salesman out with a coop and a dozen birds. The salesman takes an order from a country storekeeper, ties it to a bird, and releases it. The headline calls it a carrier for a go-getter. The papers are covering it completely straight, this is not tongue in cheek. After a search, this story ran in nearly every newspaper across the country over the course of the spring/summer of 1926.

And they weren't the only ones. Two months earlier, in March, the Peninsula Daily News out of Port Angeles, Washington had already introduced the world to W. "Bill" Glazier, traveling salesman for Sperry Products, and his plan to do the same thing.

Bill's version had a certain flair to it. He planned to bring the pigeons to Port Angeles, get them a room and bath at the Olympus Hotel, tie his flour orders under their wings, and send them back to Tacoma. He figured that if a customer gave him an order at nine in the morning, the pigeons would dog it to Tacoma by eleven, and the order would be back on the night train. The paper noted, with admirable restraint:

Was this a genuine business operation or very good press? In 1926 those two things were not always easy to tell apart. The story ran on the NEA wire and appeared in papers from Oklahoma to Indiana. Sperry Products got its name in front of readers from coast to coast.

Either way, Mrs. Massa has questions.

September 2nd, 1927. Fifteen months after the carrier pigeon sales revolution launched across the Pacific Northwest. Mrs. Charles Massa writes to the editor of the St. Louis Star. She found a carrier pigeon in her backyard in Maryville, Illinois, unable to fly, a few days ago. It has a ring around its left foot with the number N.J.27.GIL.5. Anyone having lost such a pigeon, please write or call at the following address.

P.O. Box 76, Madison County.

I’m not sure how far pigeons fly, but if you think customer service is bad these days, at least your order isn’t stuck to the leg of an injured pigeon 1500 miles away in a stranger’s backyard.

For what it's worth, carrier pigeons had been doing genuinely remarkable things in this era. The Germans had been strapping cameras to them since before the war, sending them up to photograph terrain from the air. Julius Neubronner received a patent for the pigeon camera in 1908. The birds were real. The technology was real. Whether Bill Glazier's flour orders ever made it back to Tacoma on the night train is a different question entirely.

See you tomorrow, pigeons.

— Chris

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