Mailing Miss May; A little girl and a railroad became famous together

It was a bitter cold February morning when May's parents woke her from sleep and bundled her up for her journey to Lewiston.

Little more than that etched its way into the memory of the 5-year-old whose story would become known across the country.

In later years when the story would surface, May would chuckle at the notoriety she had gained, and then continue with her household chores.

Now, 13 years after her death, family members wish they had asked more questions about May's amazing childhood journey.

Little May Pierstorff was the only person ever to have been sent through the U.S. mail.

The family story had been tossed around ever since that early morning in 1914, but it wasn't until a Brigham Young University professor brought the story to life in the pages of a children's book that Craigmont's Jo Thomason realized the potential of that family story.

"We had a tremendous reaction," she says of the book.

Related through an intertwining of marriages in the Vinnegarholtz and Pierstorff families, Jo and May had spent many holidays together in Lewiston.

The railroad mail clerk who delivered May from her parent's house in Grangeville to her grandmother's house in Lewiston was a Vinnegarholtz and had a huge home in East Lewiston where the families would gather, Thomason remembers.

She describes the family as short, chubby, fair-skinned people, not lanky Italians like are depicted in Michael O. Tunnell's book, "Mailing May."

"They don't look anything like Idaho homesteaders," Thomason says of the people in the book.

But they don't mind.

In fact, the book caused Thomason and her daughter, Shelly Kuther, who are both active in the Ilo-Vollmer Historical Society, to look into the trip that took young May down that snowy mountain to see her grandmother.

Newspaper articles from around the country told of the young girl's journey, but the facts seemed a bit skewed. Thomason believes the best information may come from a two-page story Leonard Mochel, the mail clerk who took May from Grangeville to Lewiston in his railroad mail car, wrote about the incident.

It was just over a year after the U.S. Post Office began parcel post deliveries. Mochel was staying with May and her family on the Grangeville end of his daily run. Mochel and May's mother were cousins.

Early on the morning of Feb. 19, May's mother told Mochel she had a package for him to mail.

"She gave me a fifty cent piece to pay the postage and dramatically presented the package -- her forty-seven pound daughter," Mochel wrote.

Despite accounts the postage was stuck directly onto May's back, Mochel remembered the postage was actually attached to her small suitcase.

The ride wasn't as glamorous for little May as the children's book depicts. Not only was it early in the morning and cold, but Mochel remembered May getting dizzy and sick as the train traveled down the curves and trestles toward Lewiston.

It was when she went to the door for some fresh air that the conductor, Harry Morris, spotted the girl, Mochel wrote.

After hearing the story of how the girl had gotten on the train, and inspecting the parcel post stamps on her suitcase, Morris laughed and went back to work. But it was Morris who informed the newspaper of the incident upon their arrival in Lewiston.

"At the mention of newspaper, I began to sense alarming possibilities shaping up," Mochel wrote, "and wished I had been more firm with my cousin and refused to have any part in mailing her parcel post package."

His fear was founded.

It didn't take long before the story was repeated in newspapers from Seattle to New York, and Mochel received a letter from George H. Addleman, the chief clerk of the U.S. Post Office Department in Spokane.

The letter questioned Mochel about his "package" and threatened to give him 500 demerits. It took just 700 demerits to be dismissed from the job.

Eventually, May's family paid for half the regular price of a ticket on the train and Mochel was spared the demerits.

Just a few days later, a story came out in newspapers around the country saying it was illegal to mail children.

"Despite all talk to the contrary," wrote Mochel, "I am quite sure that this was the only instance of a human being going by United States mail."

So who was May?

Charlotte May Pierstorff was born May 12, 1908. Her father, John, was very strict, says May's daughter, Anna May Perkins of Umatilla, Ore. May once had a dress with gaps in the sleeves and her father thought it too risqu‚ to wear.

May met her husband, Kay Sipes, in Lewiston Orchards, after her family moved from the farm outside Grangeville to the valley. They were married in 1928.

"I guess that was a kind of love-at-first-sight kind of thing," Perkins says of her parents.

The couple moved to the Grangeville area, where Sipes worked for Washington Water Power.

The couple lived far out of town and when their first child, Gerald, started school, they sent him to stay with his grandparents in Lewiston because there was no bus route to their rural Idaho County home.

By the time Anna May came along in 1931 and started school six years later, there was a bus that picked the kids up and took them to school in Kooskia.

The family moved to Lewiston in about 1937, Perkins says, and her father continued his job with Washington Water Power. Ironically, the family lived at the corner of Burrell and 11th, the same house May had been shipped to 25 years earlier.

They moved to Seattle for a brief time while Sipes worked with his brother in a dry cleaning business, but it didn't take long for him to tire of the city and they moved back to Lewiston.

"That's where (May) spent the majority of the rest of her life," Perkins says.

The story of May's train trip in the mail car came up occasionally, she says. Most recently she remembers an article in Parade Magazine in about 1978. Perkins' son in San Diego saw the story and told his mother. Like many times before, no one questioned May about the little piece of history.

"She would kind of laugh about the whole thing but she never really said too much about it," Perkins says.

But May's son Gerald must have had railroad in his blood, because he worked on the Camas Prairie Railroad his entire career. He started as an agent-telegrapher and became a claim agent/station supervisor on the same line his mother rode as a child.

After May's husband died in 1971, she went to work as a cook for the Wagner ranch in East Lewiston. Later, she worked at the Lewiston Cleaning Works, a dry cleaning business.

She died in 1987, but her story lives on in "Mailing May," the children's book published by Greenwillow Books 10 years after her death.