Something About the Khaki Mailboxes

Drab, drab! I am the olive-colored mailbox.

When Lewis first walks to Uncle Jonathan's house, they pass a mailbox at the corner of Mansion and Hight Streets with the phrase "For Deposit of Mail Only" on it (The House with a Clock in its Walls, 8).  Later, with Tarby, Lewis sees the "khaki-colored mailbox at the foot of High Street" (p.50).

These mailboxes were enough to prompt some questions.  John Bellairs's lifelong friend, Charles Bowen, answered.

When John and I (and Lewis) were kids, all U.S. mailboxes were painted the same color, which I would not call khaki.  Khaki is a light tan color, which you can see anywhere in the form of the pants most people call khakis. During World War II and for quite a while afterward, this was the color of the uniform enlisted men wore in the Army (officers' shirts were also this color).

However, the mailboxes were painted a dark greenish brown or brownish green, as were many tanks, jeeps, and other military equipment at that time.  We called this color "olive drab." (Anyone who ever put together model airplane kits back when you had to paint them yourself will probably have bought at least one bottle of olive drab Testor's paint. It was called "dope" at that time, even on the label, but I had no idea that you could get high on it, or on glue for that matter.)

So we have the color straightened out and can assume the mailbox Lewis saw was more olive green in color and not tan.  Or brown. 

Now to the mailbox itself.  There used to be two kinds of mailboxes, identical in general shape, but only one had a slot where you could insert mail. These said, "For deposit of mail only" – this was so people, according to Bowen, "would be duly warned against the federal crime of putting their gum wrappers, empty cigarette packs, and garbage in there."  Ha!

The other kind of mailbox had no accessible slot but only a locked door on the front.  Except in rural areas, mail was always delivered by pedestrian postmen.  No mail carrier wanted to start out each day from the main post office in the morning carrying everything he would deliver on his route.  These relay boxes existed along the way so that when he finished delivering all the mail in his first pack, he would arrive at a relay box, unlock it, take out the next bunch of mail, and continue on with his route.  Trucks went around early in each cycle (in those days, the postman came around twice each day, so there were two delivery cycles) delivering the appropriate bunch of mail to each box so that it would be there when the postman arrived.

Sometime after the U.S. Post Office was reorganized as the United States Postal Service in 1970, all the "deposit of mail" boxes (the ones you and I could use to mail a letter) were painted red, white, and (mostly) blue.  The relay boxes remained olive-drab for at least a few years, though some may have been painted solid blue without the red and white trim.

In Lewis's day, all mailboxes, deposit and relay, would have been olive drab by my classification.  However, the fact that John refers to this color as khaki suggests a dialectal difference.  It wouldn't surprise me if khaki is the name people in Marshall have always used for dark greenish brown or brownish green.

After all, the pants I used as an example of khaki were de rigeur for young men during my high school and college years, and at Notre Dame I learned that people from different parts of the country had different names for them.  Easterners called them khakis, but Californians called them chinos (which later became universal, until Dockers revived the name khakis), and Chicagoans, who for reasons best known to themselves preferred them in gray, called them wash pants. Jeans (which we Easterners call dungarees) were not unknown, of course, but except for guys from the mountain states, no one wore them.

And now you know.