Neither snow, nor rain nor gloom of night could stop my dad…but he never met Donald Trump

My father was a mailman. He worked for the Postal Service for 32 years, through snow, rain, heat and gloom of night. None of it could stay my dad from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.

He was a mailman before we had Zip Codes, before we had sorting machines and before the mailman drove around in little white Jeeps. My father sorted his own mail first thing every morning and delivered it on foot with a large, heavy, leather bag hung off his shoulder. On one of his routes, as I remember it, he told me he walked 11 miles a day, up and down the hills of Fairmont, West Virginia, and up and down thousands of steps to mailboxes on people’s porches.

On rainy days, he got soaking wet. On snowy days, he got freezing cold. On sunny days, he sweated through his clothes. I never heard him complain.

He treated everybody on his route like family. Old ladies would give him money to buy them stamps because they couldn’t get out to the Post Office themselves, and he’d deliver them the following day. At Christmas time, my father delivered thousands of cards and dozens of small packages, working long hours into the night, and he got paid very little overtime for his effort. He also got a lot of fruitcakes, Christmas cards and $5 bills from his customers.

Once every few months he delivered everybody a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Try to imagine what it was like carrying hundreds of those thousand-page books around for eight hours or more.     

He couldn’t carry all the mail at one time, so there were Army green “relay boxes” strategically placed along his route. A truck would drive around in the morning and fill them up, and when my dad came to one, he’d open the box with keys he carried on a long chain and take out a bunch of mail, deliver it, and do the same thing at the next relay stop until all the mail had been disbursed. The next day, he’d do it all again.

Wash, rinse, repeat.  

After so many years, when he had built up a lot of seniority, he was able to “bid into” certain mail routes if they became available. That way, he eventually got to be the mailman who came to our own house. It meant that in bad weather, he could come inside and put on dry clothes or extra socks or a rain slicker, or just spend 10 minutes talking to my mom and getting warm before getting back to work. He could do that because as far as I know, in 32 years on the job, he never took the time he was allowed to eat lunch.

Eventually, the Jeeps arrived and the sorting machines were installed and everybody was assigned a Zip Code and they started sorting Fairmont’s mail in Clarksburg. My dad kept working for a few years, finally retired in the early 1980s and died in 1985.

So why am I writing this essay now?

Because for better or worse, the Post Office has been a part of my life since I was just a little boy, and now the president of the United States is trying to dismantle it to restrict mail-in voting so he can steal the 2020 election…and that really pisses me off. You may have read that the Post Office is one of the largest employers of veterans in the country, and that’s true. My dad was a World War II veteran who got a job there after the war, and was even given credit for his years of military service.

Everybody in Fairmont knew my dad, who probably delivered mail to all of them at one time or another, and I grew up as the mailman’s son. Until recently, when I’d meet someone for the first time, I could say, “You might have known my dad. He was a mailman,” and people would reply with, “Oh, sure, I knew your dad.”

Sadly, the people who could say that now have mostly passed away.

The Post Office is also a very important institution in rural America where an aging population depends on the mail to deliver their bills, their Social Security and pension checks and even their medications. According to The New Yorker:

“In 2012, when the Postal Service planned on closing 3,830 branches, an analysis by Reuters showed that eighty per cent of those branches were in rural areas where the poverty rate topped the national average. You know who delivers the Amazon package the final mile to rural Americans? The U.S.P.S. You know how people get medicine, when the pharmacy is an hour’s drive away? In their mailbox. You know why many people can’t pay their bills electronically? Because too much of rural America has impossibly slow Internet, or none at all. These are the places where, during the pandemic, teachers and students all sit in cars in the school parking lot to Zoom with one another, because that’s the only spot with high-speed Wi-Fi.”

According to Jane Kleeb, chair of Nebraska’s Democratic Party, the mail “is a universal service that literally levels the playing field for all Americans. It is how we order goods, send gifts to our family and keep small businesses alive. In the era of the coronavirus, mail is now our lifeline to have our voices heard for our ballots in the election.”

So it breaks my heart to see what’s happening to the Postal Service. It’s disturbing that a man who has no regard for the history and tradition of this country can systematically strip away everything that’s good about America to feed his own ego and his narcissistic quest to stay in power, and even more disturbing that he is doing it in broad daylight while openly admitting in televised interviews that his motive is to suppress the vote.

More to the point, I want to know why Congress can go home in the midst of such a crisis when mailboxes are being removed and sorting machines are being dismantled and nobody is doing anything about it. I want to know why our leaders are allowing Donald Trump to flush America down the toilet while they sit back and pin their hopes on an election he intends to steal.