While the employees of the post office in Albany (New York) loaded the sacks to distribute the mail around the city, they found a surprise:a terrier puppy, a terrier cross to be more exact. He was huddled in the sacks against the cold. It was an ordinary morning in 1888. The employees decided to adopt him as a pet and named him Owney .
Everyone took care of Owney and he went around the work stations saying hello to everyone, but he had an obsession… you take them out with the mail. He liked to sleep on them and jump from one to another. Fed up with having to force him down when the cars left for delivery, one day they decided to leave him among the bags. And in this way he was touring the city.
But the city was too small for this tireless traveler. The next step was to travel by train to other cities accompanying the mail. And no matter what, he always managed to get back to the Albany office. To make things easier, the employees bought her a necklace on which they engraved…
Owney. Post Office in Albany, New York.
He became famous throughout the country because he was said to bring good luck:none of the trains he traveled on for years had any accidents or been held up by robbers. In all the cities he visited they put a medal on his collar, to the point that so many medals were a problem for poor Owney. So, in 1894 the Postmaster General commissioned him to make a harness with a postman's jacket so that he could better carry "the weight of fame". He traveled thousands of kilometers by train and received more than a thousand badges / medals from the cities he visited.
In 1895 he would be tested by fire:he embarked on the steamer Victoria on a 129-day North Pacific Postal Service publicity tour with a suitcase in which he carried his blanket and brush.
It is not known how old he was, but in 1897 his strength began to fail, his eyesight and character began to sour. He had an incident with an employee of a post office in Toledo (Ohio), whom it seems that he bit, and someone - nobody wanted to claim responsibility - sacrificed him. A collection was made among the Post Office employees and they left it in the hands of one of the best taxidermists in the country. Owney was displayed at the Post Office Department headquarters in Washington DC until 1911, when he was donated to the Smithsonian Institution where he remains a popular attraction today.
Today, Owney would not have found as much accommodation in the modern containerization systems of postal operators, much more efficient and rational, but certainly devoid of the possibilities of the sacks of yesteryear that, you can see, if you visit the Postal Museum and Correos Telegraph.
