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 “not very nice” without further explanation.

The safest of all adults – or so we believed, but for my money, rightfully so – were our friendly deliverymen, whether they toted milk, eggs, bread or our mail right up to our doors.

Still, as friendly and kind as I recall our mailmen (they’re called letter carriers today), I bet I would have taken off in the other direction if one of them greeted us with, “Hey, kids, want to meet Mr. ZIP?”

Looking back, I don’t think I was ever formally introduced to Mr. ZIP. But I know he existed, because a plethora of U.S. Postal Service history accounts tells me so.

I was 9, between third and fourth grades, when Mr. ZIP was born 50 years ago this week, the progeny of Harold Wilcox, an obviously creative, Mad Men-era ad guy tasked with introducing to a skeptical America the Postal Service’s new (and revolutionary, many said) mail-addressing system that involved adding a five-digit code after the city and state.

Mr. ZIP’s name is the acronym for Zoning Improvement Plan, the early 1960s initiative that the Postal Service – then called the Post Office Department –
unveiled on July 1, 1963, as the less bureaucratic sounding ZIP code.

As colleague Dave Brooks suggested this week in a short missive in his blog “Granite Geek,” we media types are somehow drawn to round-number anniversaries and typically allow nary a one to flit by without at least considering marking it with a story or column.

Celebrating anniversaries such as Mr. ZIP’s 50th is to celebrate American pop culture. Further, we often remember the 1950s and 1960s as a quieter, less rushed and less worrisome time, an era we’re quick to credit for birthing the lion’s share of 20th-century Americana.

But few periods are as laden with history-making news and landmark decisions, not to mention the precursor to the most sweeping societal revolution in domestic American history. Mr. ZIP came about in the midst of unprecedented social and political turmoil over civil rights, and was introduced as America observed the centennial of the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s crowning address.

Here at home, the area sweltered in a searing, two-week heat wave.

A 31-year-old ex-Marine and Revolutionary War buff named Steve Rogers was named the Nashua YMCA’s new youth services director. Grand reopening plans for a revamped Fields Grove were postponed because –
wait for it – a sheet of “scum” had mysteriously formed on the surface, the Nashua Telegraph reported.

I don’t know how he was received in other corners of the nation, but here in Nashua, Mr. ZIP wasn’t exactly headline material. As a matter of fact, “Mr. ZIP” never appeared in a June 28 Telegraph story reminding letter writers to start putting “03060” in their return addresses and on all mail sent to Nashua.

The rather short story, headlined “Nashua to Have ZIP Code to Speed Mail Delivery,” was relegated to the back page.

“Our five-digit ZIP Code is 03060, Postmaster Evelyn C. Earley announced today,” it began. When “ZIP Code is in full swing,” she predicted, “the United States will have the most modern system of mail distribution and delivery in existence.”

I wonder if Earley imagined that one day Nashua’s letter-writing population would swell to the point we’d need more ZIP codes?

The reason ZIPs were invented in the first place was to help increasingly overwhelmed postal workers sort mail more quickly, so it stands to reason fast-growing cities such as Nashua would one day outgrow a single ZIP code.

That day came in 1980, perhaps early ’81, when 03060 was joined by 03061, 03062 and 03063.

Every address east of the Everett Turnpike continued to use 03060, and 03061 was assigned to all post office box addresses.

Those west of the turnpike were split by the Nashua River; to the north, you got 03063, and to the south, 03062.

It took about a decade before 03060 was pretty much saturated.

That’s when 03064 was created and assigned to addresses east of the turnpike and north of the Nashua River.

From all accounts, we Nashuans accepted our new ZIPs, and subsequent changes, graciously compared with some of our fellow Americans.

Cheerful images of Mr. ZIP notwithstanding, pockets of “ZIP resisters” began springing up, their fuses ignited by what many perceived as yet another attempt by government to control us by assigning numbers to yet another phase of our lives.

Here’s a classic I found, penned by a Los Angeles Times editorialist: “What with wage earners already neatly tagged with social security numbers, and all-digit phones multiplying, the numbers wizards should have us pigeon-holed and responding to subliminal remote control in plenty of time to beat Orwell’s 1984 deadline.”

At a time when we trusted nobody who even knew the capital of Russia and kept a wary eye out for “Commies” allegedly infiltrating our American way, it isn’t that surprising that some would feel threatened by what must have seemed like full-scale “numberization” of society.

Why, most of us were still getting used to seven-digit phone dialing, thrust upon us in place of the quaint alphanumeric system (i.e., “TUxedo 2-9022” became 882-9022) – “with area codes added in to boot!” U.S. Postal Museum curator Nancy Pope wrote in her blog on ZIP code history.

Another uprising surfaced in the early 1980s when the Postal Service dared add another four digits to each ZIP code.

But the resistance was muted compared with 30 years earlier, perhaps because by then, Americans were getting used to numbers and codes being a necessary part of their lives.

For me, it’s bring on the microchips. There’s something enticing about the prospect of dialing the phone or logging on to everything simply by imagining a series of numbers and letters. Now, that’s a ZIP code.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Shalhoup on Twitter
(@Telegraph_DeanS).