I was thinking about Spokane’s unusual ‘chiral’ street address system. Most places decide even/odd in a static cartesian way. For instance, Enid has even on the north side of all horizontal streets and the west side of all vertical streets. The Spokane rule is more dynamic and polar, same for horizontal and vertical and diagonal.
If you’re heading out from center, with increasing addresses, even is on your right.
This resembles the chiral rule for magnetic lines.
I started wandering online to find other examples, and bumped into an entirely unfamiliar type of address, apparently quite common. Some rural areas still have Rural Routes served by postal employees, with addresses like RR 5 Box 256. Routes served by contractors have Highway Contract numbers like HC 5 Box 256. This distinction must be fairly recent.
In earlier decades many (most?) routes were served by contractors who also carried anything else that would pay. There was no official distinction. All were RR.
Some contractors took advantage of their predictable pattern to run a sort of bus service with reliable stops. For instance,
F.J. Henderson had a contract to deliver the United States mail on the Syracuse-Johnson-Elkhart mail route from 1913-1920. Henderson’s Ford T is a wonderful mix of pieces, nicely carpentered together to carry both mail and passengers. The ‘bed’ is probably homemade. The passenger part is clearly from a center-door sedan:
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Later, tried to find when this change happened. Proper history of HC is missing from online sources, even Reddit’s subsection for USPS employees. This description of Star Routes rings a bell. I remember hearing about Star Routes in earlier decades, but I didn’t realize they were private. The term changed from Star Route to HC in 1970, along with Nixon’s privatization of the former government department, which began its decline. (A mention of 1970 or Nixon in any context automatically implies “began its decline”, so the above sentence is redundant.)
Polistra's Mill 