Mr. Lytle, being the dedicated postal carrier that he was, and probably seeing no other option, took the Beagles' infant, plopped him into a mail bag (probably), and delivered him safely to the boy's grandmother, Lois, about a mile away. (One has to assume that the Beagles were either monumentally lazy, or just really, really hated hanging out with Lois.)

According to a news report from the time, Lytle was "the first man to accept and deliver under parcel post conditions a live baby"—but, remarkably, he wasn't the last.

The most famous case of a child getting posted (thanks to a 1997 children's book named Mailing May) was when 4-year-old Charlotte May Pierstorff was sent to her grandmother in Lewiston, Idaho, 73 miles away from her cheap-ass parents in Grangeville, who didn't want to fork out for an actual train ticket. Charlotte cost 53 cents to post, and traveled the entire journey in a train's mail compartment, which doesn't sound at all traumatizing!

Think that's bad? In 1914, a two-year-old boy (TWO!) was mailed over 200 miles by his grandmother in Stratford, Oklahoma, to his aunt in Wellington, Kansas. (Where, oh where, were this kid's parents?) He wore the 18 cent postage around his neck and was transported by a number of insanely patient mail carriers.

By 1915, postal service workers had very wisely started refusing to carry kids, though one—an absolute trooper by the name of J. T. Sebastian—found himself with no other choice. Sebastian reported to the postmaster of Jackson, Kentucky, that he had been forced to deliver a 30 pound three-year-old named Maude Smith for 30 miles, from Caney. “I doubt the legality of the sending,” Sebastian wrote, “but it was put on train and I must deliver and report.”

One newspaper reported that: “The child was seated on a pack of mail sacks between the mail carriers’s knees and was busily eating away at some candy it carried in a bag. In the other hand it carried a big red apple… The child wore a pink dress to which was sewed a shipping tag." Despite Sebastian's reluctance to carry the person-parcel, neither the sender, R. K. Madden, nor receiver, Celina Smith, got in any trouble.