Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
I woke up around 3:00 AM, went to the bathroom to take care of business, and started reminiscing about my early days in the working world. Sometimes I get into these memories, and my mind won’t shut down, so I can go back to sleep. I tossed and turned until about 4:45, thinking about that period in my lif,e and I began to wonder if I had enough to make these memories into a story. Well, here I am at my computer in the wee hours of the day, and I’m gonna take a shot at it.
It was a big deal figuring out what I was going to do for a job after graduating from High School. I was whisked away to Chicago, where I was enrolled in a trade school for electronics. That didn’t catch my fancy, and other than having a great time living on my own in the windy city, my biggest memory of that school was all the poetry on the bathroom walls. (I’m going to come back to that memory later)
It was during my 3 years, 8 months, and 9 days of military service that I finally figured out what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a mailman. When I went back to civilian life, getting hired at the post office was my immediate goal. It took a little while, but I got hired as a clerk working the night shifts. It was 2 years before I got the opportunity to transfer to the day shift as a mailman, my dream job. There were five stations in Stockton, and I bounced around all of them as a part-time carrier. Calaveras Station was my favorite one as I liked delivering the mail in that area. My first regular route was at the East Side Station, but I wasn’t going to be satisfied until I got a route at Calaveras.
This was my dream job; it was busy, and I liked most of the other employees. It was crowded, and I remember a time when there were about 60 routes in that small building. They were always moving our sorting cases around, and my favorite layout was when routes 710 to 720 formed a wall behind the box section. Richard Sandoval (we called him Mouse) was 712, I was 713, and Jim Alexander was 714. We used to smack-talk with a clerk named George. It was good-natured fun for Jim and me, but some observers of our shenanigans thought we were bullying him. George was having as much fun as we were and could give it right back to us.
Mouse had an unfortunate dog bite incident, and Jim had a lot of fun with his fake concern about the condition of his “congenzles,” as Jim put it. We had fun but were far from politically correct, which wasn’t even a thing yet in the mid-70s.
We used to call George dumb or ugly, but he was far from that, and he would call us stupid, you know, just silly man stuff. Jim was a hysterically funny old man, and I was just a hooligan wanting to have fun. I even went so far as to write observational poetry on the bathroom stall walls. It wasn’t mean-spirited stuff; it was just funny enough to get a lot of attention from my peers. They didn’t know it was me, and I only fessed up when I moved on to different assignments at the post office.
One day, we heard that George had quit the post office job, changed his name to Rod, moved to Merced, and got a job as a lounge singer and pianist. That was a shock because nobody knew he was a musician.
Later, I got a job at the Atwater Post Office, which is a neighboring city to Merced. I moonlighted as a Karaoke DJ there, found Rod, and then went to see his lounge act. He was a very talented entertainer, and I enjoyed visiting with him. He attended one of my DJ gigs, but other than that, we didn’t see each other much.
We did get a chance to reminisce about the fun we used to have at Calaveras Station and giggled about how others thought we were bullies. Even though working at Calaveras Station was a dream job for me, it wasn’t enough to satisfy my leadership genes. Before long, I really wanted to move it on up. Opportunities presented themselves, and I was on my way to something else.
It was a fun time in my life; a time where I could be silly and a little bit naughty and still do a good job delivering mail and seriously serving our community.
