WOMEN: Honored Guest

Last week in Washington 4,600 delegates to the National Association of Postmasters’ Convention, having congratulated Postmaster General Farley for showing a”net operating surplus of $10,000,000″ for the last fiscal year, praised his “humane and efficient leadership,” sat down to a feed. They ate up, among other things, 25 gallons of olives, 1,800 breasts of capons. Then they settled back to hear their boss tell them that “the U. S. Post Office and its people constitute the greatest public service in existence today.”

Guest of honor at Boss Farley’s big party was the shy and unassuming woman who has outlasted 13 Presidents of the U. S. —81-year-old Miss Mary W. Stewart, still postmistress of Oxford, Md., after 62 years.

When her postmaster father, appointed by Lincoln, died, she filled out his term, was officially designated for the job by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor machination of local politico has interrupted her service since.

To Eastern Shore oystermen, fishermen, farmers, who track the muck of river bottoms into her dim-lit office on the town’s main street, she is “Miss Mollie.” Some of them can remember when Miss Mollie used to give them candy in an envelope if there was no mail for them. In a town renowned for apocryphal anecdote, dignified little Miss Mollie has the rare distinction of figuring in none.

Miss Mollie went to the White House to tea, dressed in a new plum-colored dress. She was so overwhelmed by meeting Mrs. Roosevelt that she could not remember what the First Lady had said to her, besides, “Why, I read about you in the paper this morning. . . .” Miss Moilie had other little adventures:

A bouquet of roses presented to her at the banquet, a menu signed by Jim Farley, a waltz with an unknown postmaster. “Our badges were our introduction,” she explained. “I love to dance—the waltz glide, not this hopping around.” Then back she went to her post office on the Eastern Shore, for bi-monthly stocktaking.