Here’s a puzzling one. I wish I had more time to poke at it tonight, but I’m an hour from bedtime and two hours from being done with my paying work. I was walking east on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Ferguson and Custer, and ran across what looked like a dated-but-unsigned stamp. Of course, I knew that it surely originally had a name on it, but it was strange for the date to still be clear and the name to be completely gone. I bent down to look closely and could not make out the slightest impression in the blank part of the oval.

I walked a short distance further east and found the paired stamp facing the other direction. This time I could make out letters, but they raised further questions.

It looks to read “L.P.W.” The L is pretty difficult to read and I’m willing to consider that I may be wrong on that, but the P and W are distinct. Lansing Public Works? It seems likely, though they were stamping “Lansing DPW” at least through part of the 1940s. That’s not the puzzling part, though. The puzzling part is that I just recently discovered a Lansing DPS stamp from 1950 and had inferred that the Department of Public Works had become the Department of Public Service around that time. (Today it is the Public Service Department.)

Adding further intrigue to this is the fact that I have found an item in the Lansing State Journal Community Digest of July 2, 1993, advising citizens that the Lansing Department of Public Works was offering phone book recycling.