Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
It was my intention from the beginning to be a mailman, or should I say, a letter carrier. I wore that uniform with pride. Back when I first started, out of over 100 letter carriers in the city of Stockton, I could count on one hand the number of women in that job. There were no restrictions for hiring women, I think it was just a time when one income could sustain a household. The next ten years would change that dynamic forever, as prices for everything would go out the roof, forcing both adults to bring home the bacon. There was a time in the 80s that the letter carrier seniority roster would have about 20 women in a row on it. Being a good mail carrier did not require brawn. It is a superior brain that gives the carrier the edge, and in my experience, the women had that quality in abundance. Or maybe they just needed to prove that they could keep up with the men. Not only did they keep up, but they put many of them to shame.
As a letter carrier, I would not only deliver mail, but I would collect mail from collection boxes around town, I would drive 5 and 7 ton bobtail trucks to deliver the mail from the main facility to the delivery units, and even deliver Special Delivery mail anywhere in the metropolitan area. I was required to learn how to deliver mail on foot, from the vehicle in rural areas, and in cluster boxes at apartments and to businesses. When I first started, there were no neighborhood boxes in subdivisions. That would come along during my early years and become the standard for new deliveries as I watched the city of Stockton explode with homes requiring more post offices and carriers.
We sorted all of our mail by hand. We had a distribution case with slots to hold one or two and sometimes 3 deliveries at a time. We had a separate case for letters and another one for larger mail like flats or magazines. After we sorted everything, we pulled it all down and prepared our packages for delivery. There weren’t many, as Amazon didn’t exist either. We rubber-banded the letters and flats separately and trayed the mail up. We loaded our vehicle and hit the road. My personal goal every day was to bring back ONLY collection mail. We would finger our mail between deliveries and if we missorted anything we would bring it back to deliver the next day, unless we still hadn’t been to the correct address. If that was the case, it could still be delivered without backtracking. I was able to achieve that at least once a week, which was pretty good accuracy.
Today’s mail is mostly sorted by machines, which make plenty of mistakes. A machine just can’t compare with a good carrier that knows all the customers on the route by name. The address doesn’t even need to be correct for a regular mailman that knows the route. I used to love those challenges. Pulling the mail down myself allowed me to deviate from my regular line of travel. We weren’t supposed to do that, but I did it frequently in an effort to make the travel pattern the most efficient. If I found a better travel pattern, I would run it by my supervisor and if I convinced them I could save time, they would let me change it. I did it a lot, which came in handy years later when I was laying out efficient travel patterns as a manager.
Rural delivery was a separate category of employees altogether. I always loved delivering rural mail and was the first to volunteer when they couldn’t cover a route with rural carrier staffing. I was one of the few city carriers that were called on when these vacancies were open. I remember one time I was delivering mail on a levee that was extremely remote, when I pulled up to the mailbox and sunk my tires into loose sand down to the axle. It was ten miles to the nearest neighbor and wouldn’t you know it, nobody was home. There were no cell phones back then. Luckily for me, it was the first day of pheasant hunting season and a couple of guys came by and pulled me out. I asked the regular carrier the following Monday about making that delivery. He told me that there was another mailbox down by the house that he uses. He said if you try to put the mail in the box on the levee, you’ll get stuck in the sand. No kidding…
