It makes sense when you think about it. Living on campus for long stretches of time, the cadets corresponded with family and friends by mail and needed a safe space to store what money they may have had. They also needed frequent haircuts since hair length was regulated. Allan Building accommodated these everyday needs and more with a post office, bank, and barber.
In the early days, a student was assigned to the task of cutting hair. Later, a barber would come to campus once a week to do the job. When McDonogh dropped its semi-military status, the school barber was long gone, but hair length remained a big topic of discussion.
There was a bank, where students deposited their money for safekeeping and only used it to buy coupons for haircuts, phone calls, and snacks from the Brass Eagle. The bank was connected to a vault, which is accessible from the business office. Today, the vault contains files, Board minutes, and copies of The Week dating back to 1880.
The McDonogh Post Office was an official agency of the U.S. Postal Service. The Headmaster was appointed the Postmaster and an assistant did all the work. In 1941, McDonogh’s Post Office moved from a tiny space in the basement of the infirmary to the basement of Allan Building. According to an article in The Week, “The post office itself was greatly enlarged and is now a wire cage jutting off from the store proper. It is still furnished in much the same way except the new office allows the occupant to turn around and take deep breaths.”
On a typical day in 1950, the mail was picked up from the 7:15 a.m. inbound Western Maryland train by cadets who worked in the school store. At 7:40 a.m., when all the mail had been sorted, the cadets’ mail was given out; the Post Office closed at 9:00 a.m. At 4:15 p.m., the evening train to Cumberland was met by a cadet who picked up the incoming mail and brought it to the school, where it was sorted and given out until 5:30 p.m. According to an article in The Week, “Occasionally this procedure is disrupted when the train’s mail clerk forgets to push the bags out the door.”
