Now I Know More (6 page)

Some do, in fact, come back. He averages about $2 per day in return-to-Gary money and occasionally gets a few extra dollars from particularly generous benefactors. In total, he's seen a few thousand dollars over the years. He's logged all the bills he's received back (whether he declares them as income for tax or benefits purposes, who knows) and where they've come from. In some cases, the money has traveled as far afield as Australia before returning to Arizona.

We don't know Gary's last name—the CBS affiliate declined to publish it—and we don't know how legal the gambit is, either. Title 18 Section 333 of the United States Code states that anyone who (among other things) “mutilates” or “defaces” a dollar bill may be imprisoned for as long as six months, but only if that person did so “with intent to render [the bill] unfit to be reissued.” Gary's clear intent is to get spendable money back via the mail (and yes, you can legally send cash through the U.S. Postal Service) and not to render these dollar bills unfit for use. In any case, as of the winter of 2013, Gary hasn't been arrested for his create-your-own-rebate program.

College tuition is expensive, at least in the United States. The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for example, charges an estimated $33,000 per year (as of 2014) to in-state students who live on campus. That price shoots up to over $56,000 if you hail from outside of California due to “nonresident supplemental tuition.” The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I) has a similar price tag, with a base tuition of $35,000 for out-of-staters (and just under $20,000 for in-state students) plus an estimated $10,000 for room, board, and other expenses. That comes to about $30,000 for in-state students, or $45,000 for nonresidents, per year.

So you can see why someone from Illinois would prefer to go to U of I than, say, UCLA. Out of the gate, they're saving roughly half the cost. Still, $27,000 a year for four years is a lot of money. Even with grants and scholarships and student loans available, that's a significant expense for almost anyone. In 1987, a U of I freshman named Mike Hayes figured out a neat way to cut his costs. He asked a columnist at the
Chicago Tribune
to help him find donors to back his education—one penny at a time.

That year, Hayes wrote to columnist Bob Greene with his novel idea. If Hayes could get 2.8 million people to each send him one penny, his tuition, room, board, and the like would be paid for in full. (For a current U of I student, that would be one year's fees. For Hayes, that was for
all four years
.)

It was an outlandish request, sure, but perhaps it played on Greene's ego. (Greene, in 2002, would resign from the
Tribune
in disgrace for having had a sexual encounter fourteen years earlier with a seventeen-year-old student. A CNN personality commented that Greene was “famous for using his position as a columnist . . . to try to get women into bed.”) On September 6, 1987, Greene
wrote a column-slash-call-to-action
, hoping to get those 2.8 million pennies for the young Mr. Hayes. They both realized that the challenge was, probably, foolish:

Twice in the article, Greene posted Hayes's P.O. Box address. When Hayes graduated in 1991,
Greene did a follow-up piece
. The result: Hayes did not get the 2.8 million pennies. He got far fewer than that—but, to make up for it, he received a bunch of nickels and quarters and even some paper currency and checks. People from all fifty states and a few places overseas sent small donations to Hayes. Most of the money—$23,000 of it—
came within the first few weeks
. During that short time, the postmaster of Hayes's hometown estimates that Hayes received roughly 70,000 pieces of mail, meaning the average donation was in the thirty-five-cent range, plus another twenty-two cents for postage.

In the end, he collected $29,000—more than enough to cover his education. As for the leftover $1,000, Hayes decided to pay it forward:

That's 100,000 pennies, in case you're counting.

On February 19, 1914, a train departed from Grangeville, Idaho. One of its stops was Lewiston, another town in Idaho, located about seventy-five miles to the northwest. There was nothing particularly special about the train that day—no derailments or explosions or heists, and nothing as significant as even a five-minute delay. The train carried passengers and mail, just like it did whenever it ran, and everything and everyone arrived without complaint. Little Charlotte May Pierstorff, a five-year-old girl who was traveling from her parents' house to see her grandma and grandpa, got off the train and was escorted to grandma's without a problem.

Until a government official learned of May's trip.

The problem wasn't that May was a kindergarten-aged girl riding a train without a parent or guardian—that seemed to be no big deal at all, in fact. The problem was that she wasn't a passenger—not technically, at least. A passenger ticket for the ride would have cost her parents roughly a day's wages, which wasn't a viable option for them. Tossing a five-year-old onto a train as a stowaway wasn't an option, either . . . unless one is criminally insane, and there was no reason to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Pierstorff were anything other than good parents. They were resourceful, though, and found another loophole: stick fifty-three cents' worth of stamps on her coat and mail her.

At the time, the U.S. Postal Service would accept any package weighing fifty pounds or less, and little Miss Pierstorff weighed only forty-eight and a half. There were no regulations against sending people through the post—it's probably one of those things that you just assume customers won't do, so why bother having a rule? In this case, the downside of mailing a daughter was pretty low. Sure, she had to ride in the mail compartment, but that was probably a lot of fun for the five-year-old. Arguably, it was safer, since she was aboard the train without a chaperone.

There was another benefit, too. Not only did she get to grandma's house cheaper—it only cost about $12 in today's dollars—but being a piece of mail, the Postal Service wasn't done with the child when the train arrived. While Grandma and Grandpa would have had to pick up May at the train station (or otherwise provide for her continued travel) had she been a normal passenger, that wasn't the case here. The mail clerk on duty in Lewiston, a man named Leonard Mochel, had to deliver her from the train station to her grandmother's house, which he successfully did.

Soon after hearing of Pierstorff's story, the Postmaster General ended the ability of customers to send people through the mail.

Junk mail today usually consists of catalogues offering all sorts of products for sale, but typically, those products are not sexual. In the early to mid-1960s, though, that wasn't the case. It was not uncommon for people to open their mailboxes to find something they wouldn't want their twelve-year-old son to see (even if he really wanted to see it). In the latter part of that decade, the federal government passed a law (39 U.S.C. § 3008 if you'd like to look it up) aiming to help. The new rule: if you received “any pandering advertisement which offers for sale matter which the addressee in his sole discretion believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative,” you could ask your post office to issue a “prohibitory order”—that is, the Postal Service could make the sender stop sending that stuff to you.

By the early 1980s, the law had been through the legal system and come out perfectly fine, despite a challenge claiming that it violated the senders' First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. So when Larry Flint, the publisher of
Hustler
magazine, started sending his nudie mags to all 535 members of Congress—free and unsolicited—in late 1983, many congressmen asked the post office for prohibitory orders. By October of the following year, 264 of those congressional offices had demanded, via the post office, that their free subscriptions be halted.

Flint stopped, under the advice of counsel, and then sued.

His argument was a First Amendment one, but ultimately it didn't rest on freedom of speech. The First Amendment also guarantees, among other things, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Flint argued that he was trying to lead members of Congress to a revelation, opening their eyes to the world around them. As he told
The Hill
magazine in 2011, “Moses freed the Jews, Lincoln freed the slaves, and I just wanted to free all the neurotics.”