Story by Jon Stalnaker
AKA The Studebaker Dude
I took a job in Atwater, California that changed my entire life.
I was born and raised in Stockton, California, and when I completed my military service, I returned to Stockton to begin a goal career working for the post office. It started simply enough with my initial intention of becoming a mailman. I loved that job, but it did not satisfy the leadership gene in me and before long I was doing many assignments in developmental positions and supervision. I worked in several supervisory positions and was always successful in these positions but was never one of the “good old boys”.
The Postal Service had a national program designed to better labor/management relationships called EI/QWL (Employee Involvement/Quality of Work Life). When I heard about it, I became excited because it was designed to teach managers to do their jobs the way I naturally had been doing it all along. It was implemented using a pair of facilitators, one representing management and one representative from the union. I applied and was selected for that job. The “good old boys” that didn’t think I fit in with management were forced into compliance. I did this job and was successful, but the politics of the position wore me out. I tired of management’s lip service and looked for a job in an associate office where I could apply the concepts of the program without the politics. That associate office was in Atwater.
I felt the company appreciated the concept even if the local boys laughed at it. I was able to run a productive unit and Atwater was far enough away from the Sectional Center that I was able to escape the political baloney. It took awhile for the employees to trust me since I came from the very place they saw as troublesome. I did, too. It was a great office with great employees (mostly—there are always a few). I was the Superintendent of Postal Operations (SPO) of that office, which meant I was basically the assistant Postmaster.
It was a turning point in my postal career, and it made a clean break from the big city life. I hired a lot of people while I was there but one, in particular, caught my eye when she walked through the door to apply for a job. At the time, my heart was a mess, and I was praying for God to send me someone to love. I clearly remember noticing her, but she was “forbidden fruit”—things were complicated, she was married, I was married, and not to each other (yet).
My personal life at that time was crumbling apart. My marriage was taking its last breath and that gave me opportunities for far away developmental assignments at Postal Headquarters in Washington DC. I served several of them and had my eyes on a Master Instructor Job in Bethesda, Maryland. But God had other plans.
The Postal Service did some restructuring and eliminated the Master Instructor positions and the SPO positions. I was forced to look elsewhere for my next job. After I returned from my headquarters assignments, I discovered that the woman that caught my eye was going through a divorce. The heart is gonna do what the heart is gonna do, and I fell in love with her.
That woman is now my wife of 24 years and a gift from God she was. She was only a temporary employee in Atwater and was looking for a career job in the PO at the same time I was looking for a new job. She started that job in Elk Grove on the same day that I got the Postmaster job in Dixon. Talk about a sign from God. Both towns within commute distance but a long way away from Atwater.
There is no doubt in my mind that God had His hand in this whole situation. There was a lot of pain and insecurity suffered during this time in our lives, but with the pain came more prayers. And with the prayers came more blessings from God Himself. As hard as I tried to deny it because I thought I was doing something wrong, God showed me that if I trusted Him, He would work it out. And my life was changed in ways I never could have figured out myself. God is good…
