Happy birthday, Mr. ZIP! A salute to the retired post-office mascot on the ZIP code's 60th birthday

Mr. ZIP long ago got the pink slip, but you can still find him in action if you know where to look.

Mr. ZIP makes the rounds in Alexandria, Virginia. (Rolando Pujol)

Happy birthday, Mr. ZIP!

ZIP codes were first rolled out on July 1, 1963, 60 years ago today.

The five-digit numbers, part of the ZIP — Zone Improvement Plan — were an organizational godsend for the then-named United States Post Office Department, helping the agency handle the avalanche of mail coursing through the system back in those decidedly analog days, where electronic communication was the stuff of “The Jetsons,” which had debuted on ABC the year before.

Large senders of mail as well as regular folks, however, wouldn’t immediately take to using ZIP codes, so they needed a nudge. Mr. ZIP, a jauntily drawn postman on the move, provided that nudge. Mr. ZIP is actually a touch older — a proto version of him was briefly used by Chase Manhattan (and designed by the ad-man son of a letter carrier) to encourage banking by mail. The post office then hired Mr. ZIP, gave him a nip and tuck and handed him a mail bag. They promptly put him to work selling Americans on using ZIP codes to help mail move along with more ZIP!

Mr. ZIP on the job in midtown Manhattan. (Rolando Pujol)

Mr. ZIP was retired decades ago, and is now a somewhat obscure figure in a Madison Avenue pantheon that includes Tony the Tiger, Poppin’ Fresh and the Keebler Elves. Unlike those other cartoon mascots, Mr. ZIP got served a pink slip. Americans, you see, finally bought into ZIP codes, and the poor little fella had nothing left to sell, dispatched to Postal Service relic status like another speed-orientated icon of yore, the Pony Express.

But Mr. Zip hasn’t entirely been lost in the mail of American pop culture. You can find him still — if you know where to look.

You’ll see him usually in old office buildings or apartment complexes that still have old-school brass mail chutes. Stickers featuring Mr. ZIP were routinely placed in such places, and once Mr. ZIP was retired, nobody went around scraping these stickers off. He even survives, as a cutout, in some post offices — he was still at the one in Cresco, Iowa, as of 2021, and Wikipedia reports he’s also outside the post office in Encinitas, California.

There’s Mr. ZIP’s floating head on a mail chute in Manhattan. (Rolando Pujol)

So, to this day, Mr. ZIP still reminds people to use ZIP codes, even if more of them never even bother to send snail mail, a term the Zippy mascot would undoubtedly want to cancel! (Cancel? See what I did there? Postal humor.)

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