'Owney' Comes in as No. 1 for 2011 by Peter Rexford on Creators.com

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'Owney' Comes in as No. 1 for 2011

A while back, a reader wrote about the new "Forever" stamps that will always be good for First Class postage. She wondered if because of them we would no longer have different postage stamps. I replied that not only will we continue to have different stamps, but that the variety could even increase.

Last year was a good example. The topics on our stamps were both varied and interesting. The website BeyondThePerf.com is run by the Postal Service and ran a poll asking visitors to rank their favorite stamps from 2011. Many voted. In the top five were stamps featuring the merchant marine, love, artist Edward Hopper and the Civil War. The images on all were fantastic.

Though, the winning stamp was one that generated a lot of my reader mail. It was about a stray dog that, 100-plus years ago, captured attention and hearts around the country. I wrote about it before, but now that it's the favorite 2011 stamp, it bears repeating.

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."

— Mark Twain

Too much has been written about the magnificence and loyalty of dogs for me to presume to improve on any of them. But what has been written so for is for a reason. And yes, I know there are both dog people and cat people. I have nothing against the latter, but truth be told, more people seem to wax poetic about their canine companions. As Henry Wheeler Shaw put it, "A dog is the only thing on this earth that loves you more than he loves himself."

It would appear that has been the case for as long as dogs have existed and in so many forms. One of those situations dates back well over 100 years and involves the Postal Service. In fact, a dog that just happened to wander into a post office in 1888 became so beloved by postal personnel that he is now permanently immortalized.

The dog's name was Owney — at least that's what a postal clerk dubbed him. He was a stray that loved being around people.

More than that he loved being around the mail. The night he arrived, the clerks let him stay inside, and he fell asleep on a pile of mailbags.

After a while, Owney ventured from the post office to ride on mail wagons to nearby destinations. That was just the beginning of his travels. Eventually, Owney began to ride the Railway Post Office around New York state. Then, he made railroad trips across the country, all the while "guarding" the sacks of mail.

It wasn't long before the lore of Owney began to get around. Postal clerks across the nation would get updates as to Owney's travels and in 1891, the Boston Daily Globe newspaper ran a feature story about him. The RPO clerks unofficially adopted the pup as their mascot, but it sure seemed official. Clerks began affixing tags and custom-made medals on Owney's collar at different stops. Every time Owney returned to Albany the clerks there saved the tags.

All of this is nice and fun, but the RPO personnel discovered something far more significant, especially for them. At that time, technology was still somewhat basic and postal train wrecks were quite common. Naturally, with those wrecks came serious injury or death for the workers.

Thing was, whenever Owney rode a mail train, there was never a wreck. Considering the tens of thousands of miles he rode to hundreds of destinations in the U.S. and Canada that was amazing.

Owney rode the mail rails until his death in 1897. But it didn't end there. After he died, postal employees raised funds for the dog to be preserved (aka stuffed). In 1904, Owney traveled again, this time to the Post Office Department's exhibit at the World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. He now resides at the National Postal Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington.

The "Forever" stamp honoring Owney the Postal Dog features an original painting of Owney accompanied by a variety of tags that were given to him on his travels in the background. Considering all who befriended him in his travels, the stamp is a great reminder of a quote from Corey Ford, "Properly trained, a man can be a dog's best friend."

Editor's Note: A JPEG visual of the "Owney" dog stamp has been sent with this column.

To find out more about Peter Rexford and features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.