Special Delivery

 

A few minutes past seven o’clock on a dark, snowy morning in late December, light spills out through the windows of the stand-alone, forest-green building on Route 41 that houses the Richmond post office. The service window inside the lobby is closed—customers can’t buy stamps or send registered mail or make any other financial transactions until eighty-thirty—but the daily postal operations in this small Massachusetts town are well under way.

 

Behind the window, hidden from view of the occasional early-bird residents who come in to check their personal post office boxes or to slip outgoing envelopes into the appropriate slot, Koren Ahlen is standing at a counter sorting through yesterday’s bulk mail, waiting for the United States Postal Service (USPS) truck to arrive with today’s deliveries. As Ahlen, the part-time flexible clerk (PTF in jargon-intense postal parlance) divides tall piles of circulars, envelopes, and catalogs, the voices of National Public Radio float across the warm, compartmentalized space. Her takeout coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, propped in a cardboard tray, remains untouched.

 

Ahlen has already logged into the computer to check whether anyone in Richmond has requested any special mail services, such as holding or forwarding. Once in a while, she’ll receive an electronic notice. But in this Berkshire town of sixteen hundred residents, she says, “most people just come in.”

 

Residents of rural towns tend to hold their local post offices in high regard, and Richmond is no exception. In a community that has no coffee shop, grocery store, or gas station, the post office has long played an important role as an integral social hub. At the post office, people socialize, exchange neighborly information, and scan local announcements.

 

“People come in here to find out what’s happening in town,” Ahlen says.

 

Postmaster Roderick Drees, who has worked in Richmond for eight months, nods his head in agreement. “A lot of times you’ll have people show up, meet someone they haven’t seen in a long time, and they’ll be out in the lobby talking for a half hour or longer,” he says.

 

When Amy Brentano and Adam Weinberg moved from Manhattan to Richmond six years ago, one of their first priorities was to set up a post office box. “We knew there was no other real gathering place in Richmond and that the post office is where you see and meet your neighbors,” Brentano explains. “It’s sort of rural legend that the post office is where it all goes down.”

 

Margaret O’Clair, a thirty-year resident of the small town of Sandisfield, Massachusetts, visits the local post office almost every day. The institution, she says, is a vital part of the community. “It’s more than a post office,” she says. “It’s a social connection. People bump into each other.”

 

It’s also a source of information. During last December’s ice storm, O’Clair came in to ask postmaster Karen Cooley how far it was possible to travel on Route 47. As expected, Cooley provided the answer.

 

“This is the main hub for visiting and for finding out what’s going on,” confirms Cooley, who has worked in the Sandisfield post office for seventeen years, nine of which she’s served as postmaster. “You know your customers. You know each and every one of them,” she explains. “You know when they’ve had the death of a loved one, or a new child.”

 

Clifford “Skip” Skowron, the friendly, charismatic postmaster who has overseen postal operations in Glendale, Massachusetts, for fifteen years, says the post office is the first place many Glendale residents turn to for information. “If the power goes out, they call us. If there’s an accident, they call us. If their phone is out, they ask us to call [for a repair].”

 

“They want us to put a coffee shop in here,” Skowron says with a chuckle. There used to be a bench in the lobby, he says, on which customers would park themselves for long stretches of time. “Once they got comfortable, they weren’t leaving,” he recalls.

Small-town post offices have been a distinguishing characteristic of the Berkshire landscape for more than two centuries. The first post office established in Berkshire County was in the town of Stockbridge in 1792, followed by Pittsfield in 1793, Sheffield in 1794, Great Barrington in 1979, and Williamstown in 1798. The rest of the present-day post offices in Berkshire County—thirty-one, to be exact—were established in the nineteenth century. Many others opened in erstwhile locales such as East Becket, the Hoosac Tunnel, and Van Deusenville, but eventually closed as their communities diminished or were absorbed by larger ones.

 

The postal system in the U.S. was inaugurated the same year the Revolutionary War. In July of 1775, a year before the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, members of Congress called for the appointment of a Philadelphia-based Postmaster General. Benjamin Franklin was selected for the position, and it was he who created the foundation for the American mail system that functions today.    

 

What wasn’t part of the early mail system, however, was home delivery. Mail was sent from post office to post office, and local denizens were expected to drop by routinely to see if they had received anything. It wasn’t until the mid-1860s that city dwellers began to receive mail at their front doorsteps.

 

Rural residents, however, weren’t so fortunate. Farmers often couldn’t get to their local post offices more often than once a week, sometimes even less frequently in poor weather. So they began to protest; after all, they argued, they paid the same postage as people in the city. It took a while, but Congress responded to the collective call from rural residents—who, at that time, comprised two-thirds of the American voting population. In 1896, the government appropriated forty thousand dollars to start an experimental program of Rural Free Delivery, even though some outspoken legislators were convinced that offering this kind of service would spell disaster for the federal budget. Residents rushed to plant every kind of receptacle imaginable by the side of the roads—cigar boxes, syrup cans, feed cartons, nail crates, or old food containers—before the postal service called for the design of official mailboxes. In 1902, Rural Free Delivery was made permanent.

 

Skip Skowron joined the postal service in 1988, when he was forty. He was assigned to the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, operation, but he hoped from the very beginning to land in a small town.
“I wanted something where you’d learn a little bit about everything,” Skowron says. And indeed he has: in addition to handling all of the mail operations in Glendale, he’s grown accustomed to cleaning the bathroom, washing the windows, and shoveling snow from the walkways. “We wear many hats,” he says of his fellow small-town postmasters. “I have no qualms about that. It becomes like your own little store, your own little business.”

 

In his fifteen years in Glendale, Skowron has forged bonds with many of the village’s four hundred or so residents. “They’re not customers,” he says. “They’re family.”

 

With a group of elderly men he dubs the “Rover Boys,” Skowron, who lives in nearby Stockbridge, for years hit the weekend pancake breakfast circuit. “I’d pile them into the van every Sunday,” he recalls fondly. “It was my day off, at seven in the morning!”

 

Now, he says, it’s just he, eighty-eight-year-old John Miller, and eighty-seven-year-old Hank Cooper who drive off in search of pancake breakfasts; the others have passed away. “That really hurts,” he says of becoming entrenched in an aging community. “Unfortunately, you watch people get sick. Some die suddenly.”

 

On most days, it’s simply business as usual in the Glendale post office: Skowron checks the computer, sorts and distributes the mail, acts as postal sales rep and cashier, and banters with the fifty or so residents who trickle through the doors. But Skowron recalls one morning shortly after he arrived in Glendale that was unlike any other.

 

After hearing a noise outside, Skowron looked up to see a well-dressed gentleman walk in. “Are you open?” the man asked. The man explained he was on his way to the Norman Rockwell Museum, but the museum didn’t open until ten o’clock.

 

Suddenly, Skowron heard the whoosh of air brakes. It turns out the man was driving a bus packed with French tourists, who within moments formed a line that reached all the way to Glendale Road. “They all wanted to buy Elvis stamps,” he says with a loud laugh. “It looked so funny, to have the whole handicapped ramp filled with people waiting to buy stamps.”

 

Like many of his small-town postal counterparts, Skowron assists customers in ways that stretch far beyond his job description. There’s no mail delivery from the Glendale site—only one hundred and thirty-six post office boxes—but Skowron personally carries packages to a number of customers, including a one-hundred-year-old woman whose Victorian house is located nearby. “I got her TV working, too,” he admits.

 

Skowron keeps handy a list of home and cellphone numbers, so he can call residents right away upon receipt of fruit or other perishables. When people ask him to come to their houses to jump-start their drained car batteries or to open too-tight lids on jars, he always responds.

 

“He’s the love of our lives,” says Glendale resident Joan Embree.

 

Every fall, Skowron collects apples from his family’s orchard in Otis, Massachusetts, and places them outside of the post office for customers to take home. “It’s a plot,” he confesses with a grin. “That way, I get apple pies and apple sauce and apple fritters.”

 

Sandisfield’s Cooley is also committed to taking special care of her customers, whether it’s carrying packages to their cars or covering them for purchases when they’re short on cash. (“Did you get that twenty cents I stuck in an envelope?” one customer calls from the window, referring to her payback of a recent loan.)

 

Cooley, like Pam Gillette, the officer- in-charge of the Mill River Post Office in New Marlborough, Massachusetts, makes a point of keeping an eye on older residents. When someone hasn’t come in to pick up mail, they call to make sure everything is all right. So does Marilyn Curtin, who ran the Tyringham, Massachusetts, post office before her retirement this past March. “If I haven’t seen an older person in the last two or three days,” she says, “I’ll say [to customers], can someone check on her?”

 

In rural post offices, old-fashioned personal service routinely trumps the convenience of modern technology. In most cases, this may be ascribed to a mutual, tacit agreement between postal employees and their customers. Sometimes, however, it exists simply because the technology isn’t there.

 

The Mill River facility, tucked into a small section of the long-standing Mill River General Store, was among the small post offices recently wired for high-speed DSL, but at the Tyringham site—which is administered by the town instead of the USPS—Curtin doesn’t even have a computer. She doesn’t have a postage meter either; all outgoing mail is affixed with adhesive-backed postage stamps. Everything in Tyringham is done by hand—not just the sorting of the mail, a practice common to small-town post offices. Above Curtin’s desk is a long row of red and blue binders that contain handwritten entries for every postal transaction made in the office: delivery confirmations, express mail, insured packages, money orders, custom forms, and the like. “If we had a computer, we could do scans, but we have to sit and write down all of the numbers,” she says. “You’ve gotta keep track of everything.”

 

Such labor-intensive record-keeping suits Curtin just fine. “I’m illiterate when it comes to computers,” she says. “I had one [at home] once, but I finally got disgusted and gave it to my grandson.”

 

Technology-bereft Curtin may be excused, but the USPS expects postal workers to encourage rural customers to use the same online tools and official forms as their urban counterparts to request that their mail be held or forwarded or that packages be redelivered. But small-town postal employees, who are usually in a position to recognize each and every one of their customers, are known to make exceptions.

 

Richmond’s Ahlen says that residents sometimes call into the post office after they’ve left for vacation to ask that their mail be held until their return. “We accommodate them,” she admits. “That’s the convenience of having a small post office. We know you. I know your voice.”

 

People might try to commit mail fraud in cities, but not in Glendale. “No one … can really try to get anything over on us,” says Skowron. “We don’t have that problem.”

 

When Cooley receives last-minute phone calls to hold mail in Sandisfield, she alerts her carrier, who collects any mail that’s already been delivered and brings it back to await the resident’s return. “Our customers are very loyal,” she insists, and she makes it a point to treat them with the same level of respect.

 

Affable, soft-spoken Mike Perkins recently retired from the postal service after a thirty-four-year career spent in Pittsfield, West Stockbridge, and Richmond. By all accounts, he’s the kind of person who inspires camaraderie and confidence, the sort for whom community mindfulness is a way of life, not simply a way to make a living. As postmaster, Perkins gave lollipops to young visitors and routinely organized events to benefit a variety of causes: needy families, local schools, a fellow postmaster diagnosed with brain cancer, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Jimmy Fund.

 

Perkins has cultivated relationships with customers in each post office in which he’s worked, including Pittsfield, but he draws meaningful distinctions between city and rural operations. First, all mail in rural post offices, he says, is sorted by hand rather than by machine. Since postal employees in small towns tend to know the names and addresses of all residents, an envelope sent to “Grandpa, Richmond, MA, 01254” could actually be delivered to the right place, assuming the return address is familiar—and it often is—to whoever sorts the mail.

 

Second, customer service in small towns, he adds, is second to none. “You get closer to the people and you give them more personalized service,” he explains. “You go out of your way to do things.” He recalls how a woman in West Stockbridge panicked because a dress she’d ordered hadn’t arrived in time for a special event. After investigating, Perkins found out that the package was sitting in the Pittsfield post office. He drove to Pittsfield to pick it up and delivered it to her house in time for her evening engagement.

 

Perkins made it standard practice to offer to reinforce customers’ packages with extra tape or to help fill out forms for those in a hurry. The postal service frowned upon that, he says, but he remains convinced his customer-oriented philosophy served him well throughout the years. Not only did he find it personally satisfying, but it was also “good for business, because people kept coming back.”

 

When residents received mail or packages sent by overnight delivery, Perkins would call them in the morning to ask whether they wanted it delivered or if they’d prefer to pick it up personally—and, for a customer of Perkins arriving before the post office officially opened, it wasn’t a problem. “People could come knocking,” he says with a broad grin. “That’s small-town good stuff.”

 

The current core mail team in Richmond—Ahlen, Drees (who replaced Perkins), and longtime rural letter carrier Carol Chapman—tackles daily routines with remarkable swiftness and fluidity. There isn’t a moment to spare: sorting mail manually for six hundred addresses takes time, and first-class mail, periodicals, and packages must be ready for customer pick-up by 10:30 a.m. Ahlen slips envelopes in rapid succession into the two hundred-odd post office boxes maintained by residents, while Chapman sorts mail to be delivered to the four hundred addresses on her fifty-mile route. (A number of Richmond residents are served instead by the Pittsfield post office, a long-standing arrangement that many locals—and even loyal Richmond postal employees—have contested for years, to no avail.)

 

Chapman knows every address in town. She’s been delivering the mail for eighteen years—and besides, she’s a Richmond native, whose Irish ancestors settled in the town in the eighteenth century. “I have deep roots here,” she acknowledges.

 

Like most rural carriers, Chapman drives her own car instead of a government-owned truck, and isn’t required to wear a uniform. It usually takes her about four hours to make her daily deliveries, a significant portion of which is spent on the town’s many dirt roads. In addition to stuffing mailboxes, she delivers bulky packages to residents’ front doors.

 

Today she has thirty-four packages—far fewer than a couple of weeks ago, during the height of the holiday season. She streamlines the process as much as possible: before carrying the packages to her car, she makes a handwritten list of recipients that she sticks to her dashboard. “You get a good workout,” Chapman says of her daily routine. “Lots of [lifting and] stretching.” And she puts twenty thousand miles a year on her blue Chevy Blazer.

 

Being a rural mail carrier is demanding in other ways, too: Chapman hasn’t taken a vacation for two and a half years, since she went to Nova Scotia for a week in 2006. But she’s not complaining. “I love it,” she says. A rural carrier job is hard to come by, after all; the average wait when she started was fourteen years. (Today, it’s five to six years.) Once hired, rural carriers tend to stay in their jobs for a long time, earning as much as $67,000 a year, with benefits to boot—though the average national salary hovers around the forty thousand dollar mark.

 

Since the advent of the Internet, communication structures have changed dramatically. Mail volume is down, while cyber correspondence continues to rise. “Computer, e-mail, pay[ing] bills online, fax machines…. You’d be sticking your head in the sand to say that hasn’t hurt first-class mail,” Perkins admits.

It’s no secret that the USPS is struggling to maintain financial solvency. In 2008, the postal service posted a net loss of 2.8 billion dollars. Rural post offices themselves seldom make a profit; they are sustained by the overall system.

 

Five years ago, rumors swirled that rural post offices in the U.S. might fall prey to the same tragic fate as those in Britain, where 2,500 rural post offices have been ordered closed, despite a groundswell of protests. This past January, the Postmaster General announced a likely system-wide cutback in the number of delivery days (from six to five), and the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission suggested that closing small and rural post offices might be financially prudent, leaving Berkshire residents to whisper nervously, wondering if their own sites might fall victim to a challenged system in a bad economy.

 

Fiercely protective of their community hubs, small-town postmasters like Cooley urge residents to make transactions—buying stamps, ordering packages, sending certified mail—whenever possible. Even ordering services online (at www.usps.com) benefits rural offices, as long as rural purchasers use their own Zip Codes—or so say officials. Some rural postmasters, however, are skeptical. “They say we get credit, but I don’t know,” says Cooley with a shrug. She prefers to dispense more practical advice, encouraging personal visits to the local post office. “Mail packages and buy stamps from us,” she tells her customers. “Not only will you get great service, it will be so much cheaper for you. My famous saying is, ‘If you don’t use us, you’re going to lose us!’”

 

Pam Gillette in Mill River prefers to remain optimistic. “I hope they do keep [rural post offices] open,” she says. “I really believe these little communities need them.”

 

Richmond’s Roderick Drees insists that it’s all about the ties that bind. “I definitely find it rewarding, meeting with people and making them happy,” he says. It’s gratifying to “[get] the job done at the end of the day.”

 

With a good-natured laugh he adds, “Even though you know there’ll be more tomorrow.” (MAY 2009)

 

Her family’s relocation to Richmond, Mass., six years ago from Washington, D.C., reawakened freelance writer Christine Hensel Triantos to the value of small-town institutions like the post office. She can be reached by sending a letter to “Spyros’ Wife,” or “Nicholas and Melina’s Mom,” Richmond, MA, 01254.

 

THE GOODS

Glendale Post Office
17 Glendale Rd./Route 183
Glendale, Mass. 01229
413.298.3704

Mill River Post Office
8 Mill River-Great Barrington Rd.
Mill River, Mass. 10244
413.229.8582

Richmond Post Office
2089 State Rd./Route 41
Richmond, Mass. 01254
413.698.3121

Sandisfield Post Office
83 Sandisfield Rd./Route 57
Sandisfield, Mass. 01255
413.258.4940

Tyringham Post Office
118 Main Rd.
Tyringham, Mass. 01264
413.243.1225