{"id":1423,"date":"2010-09-20T08:17:55","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T13:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/?p=1423"},"modified":"2010-09-20T08:17:55","modified_gmt":"2010-09-20T13:17:55","slug":"the-story-behind-postal-service%e2%80%99s-unofficial-motto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/2010\/09\/20\/the-story-behind-postal-service%e2%80%99s-unofficial-motto\/","title":{"rendered":"THE STORY BEHIND POSTAL SERVICE\u2019S UNOFFICIAL MOTTO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"highslide\" onclick=\"return vz.expand(this)\" href=\"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/James-A-Farley-Post-Office.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-1424\" title=\"James A Farley Post Office\" src=\"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/James-A-Farley-Post-Office-150x150.gif\" alt=\"James A. Farley Post Office Building\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>ETCHED IN STONE<br \/>\n<\/strong><em>THE STORY BEHIND POSTAL SERVICE\u2019S UNOFFICIAL MOTTO<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers<br \/>\nfrom the swift completion of their appointed rounds.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Postal Service has no official motto. The popular belief that it does is a tribute to America\u2019s postal workers. The words above, thought by many to be the motto, are chiseled in gray granite over the entrance to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue. In 1982, the building was renamed the James A. Farley Post Office Building in honor of the 53rd Postmaster General.<\/p>\n<p>The motto comes from Book 8, Paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by Herodotus. During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians used a system of mounted couriers.<\/p>\n<p>The firm of McKim, Mead and White designed the New York General Post Office, which opened to the public on Labor Day, 1914. One of the firm\u2019s architects, William Mitchell Kendall, was the son of a classics scholar and read Greek literature for pleasure. He selected the \u201cNeither snow nor rain &#8230;\u201d inscription, which he modified from a translation by Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard University, and the Post Office Department approved it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ETCHED IN STONE THE STORY BEHIND POSTAL SERVICE\u2019S UNOFFICIAL MOTTO Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. The Postal Service has no official motto. The popular belief that it does is a tribute to America\u2019s postal workers. The words above, thought [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usps-new-bytes","category-editors-section","last_archivepost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1423"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1426,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions\/1426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}