Our postal carriers are an essential part of the team who work faithfully to bring local news from our Echo staff to you, and Echo Publishing is extremely grateful for their service.
Many have probably heard some version of the phrase "The mail must go through," and though it is not an official motto of the Pony Express or the United States Postal Service, it is still very well known. Conversely, an inscription on the New York City General Post Office reads, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." With a long history, this quote is from Herodotus, a Greek historian, referring to the Persian postal system.
Today in Oceana County, few of us receive our mail by couriers on foot. Many residents collect their mail from a post office box and the post office becomes a community hub where news about local residents is heard and shared. More of us have our mail delivered by a postal worker in a car or truck and the delivery time depends on the day of the week, whether the driver is the regular carrier or a substitute and how many parcels need to be delivered.
Post offices vary in size and services according to the population served. An Actual Post Office (ACO) is large enough to employ the administrative services of a postmaster, while a Remotely Managed Post Office (RMPO) is under the direction of a postmaster in a nearby ACO.
Oceana County has four ACOs which are located in Pentwater, Hart, Shelby and Hesperia, and are in the smallest size category of ACO possible. Each has a postmaster, full-time window service by one or more clerks and provides delivery to neighboring communities. On the border of Oceana and Newaygo counties, Hesperia delivers in both counties. The remaining post offices in the county are RMPOs and are located in Mears, Walkerville, Rothbury and New Era. They offer window services with clerks who may be full-time or part-time. The Oceana Echo is delivered every week to all these small and larger post offices in addition to offices in Montague.
Outside of inclement weather and poor road conditions, our local postal workers face challenges behind the scenes that loom larger. Recently, Pentwater carriers were instructed not to deliver mail to residents on Chester Street for a few days when the road was being reconstructed after installation of the new water line. Pentwater, Hart and Shelby postal workers shared their particular obstacles to efficient service.
Pentwater Postmaster Chris Roberts explained, “Without a doubt, my biggest challenge is staffing. There are many regulations that determine how, when, and how many people I can hire. Employees must always start part-time, there are rules governing substitutes, and it is illegal to use volunteers. The demand for services varies tremendously between summer and winter, but I cannot hire seasonal employees. In the winter we have 525 active post office boxes, and our carriers deliver mail to 1,600 addresses. In the summer we have 700 active post office boxes, and our carriers deliver mail to 3,500 addresses. We have three delivery routes managed by two full-time and one auxiliary carrier. One driver has a route with 800 addresses; it is considered an ‘overburdened route.’”
He continued, “Based on our number of customers, we could have seven employees. But we have only four. The size of our trucks is inadequate to handle the quantity of large parcels mailed by Amazon. It is not uncommon for our carriers to make two or three trips to the office daily to restock their trucks with more of the day’s mail. The average number of parcels our carriers deliver is about 435 . But on Saturday, July 5, we had 930 parcels that had to be delivered. It would be very helpful to have larger trucks.”
Mail is heaviest on Mondays and around the holidays, but it can also be larger on Fridays and Saturdays.
Postal workers in Oceana regularly offer help to one another. Clerks will travel from their own assigned post to work in other offices when illness or other reasons leave a neighboring office window unattended. Roberts is a 21-year veteran of postal work and has training as both a carrier and a clerk. He was appointed as Pentwater's postmaster three years ago. In addition to administrative duties, he works the window, sorts the mail and delivers the mail, particularly parcels, to complete carrier routes. He reports that the carriers often work long days, well past the supper hour, and have occasionally delivered parcels on Sundays to manage the workload.
Regarding The Oceana Echo, Roberts reports, “Everybody loves the Echo. If they don’t receive it on Friday, or don’t see it on the counter, they ask for it. They especially fly out of here in the summer, when we have run out of them a few times.” What Roberts wanted to emphatically communicate to all Pentwater postal customers was, “Our carriers do care – they REALLY do. They bend over backwards, even working on their days off, to get mail delivered to their customers.” They truly are everyday heroes.
Larry Rasmussen has worked at the Hart post office for 31 years, serving as a carrier on city and rural routes and as a clerk. “The Hart post office administers mail service for the communities of Hart, Mears and Walkerville. The Hart facility has 400 boxes for Hart and 150 boxes for Mears and sends mail for another 100 boxes to the Walkerville office," Rasmussen explained. "There is a total of 10 carrier routes for the three communities and close to 4,000 delivery addresses on those routes.”
When asked about current challenges, he didn’t have to think twice before replying, “Our biggest challenge is Amazon. Their parcels have expanded our workload tremendously.”
Gone are the days when postal carriers managed their load of envelope deliveries in a bag they shouldered until it was empty. When something was too big for a resident’s mailbox or mail slot, they got a note instructing them where they could go to pick it up. Today the carriers deliver to a resident’s door whatever will not fit in their mailbox. Administering the services in Hart is their Postmaster Chad Barnaby, who has been there for four years.
Shelby’s post office recently welcomed new Postmaster Candice Giddings, who moved there from a post in Muskegon. Roxanne Van Laan has been a postal worker in Shelby for over 25 years and is a few months from retirement.
She recently recounted their biggest challenges as issues with their phone service and Amazon. “Our back door for deliveries is too small to allow the large Amazon shipping crates to fit through it. Each crate needs to be broken down to bring the parcels into the office...It’s a lot of work and we have had as many as 12 crates of parcels crowding our space at one time. Our building is old and too small for handling the work. The mail for Rothbury and New Era as well as for Shelby comes through this space.”
The idiom “Walk a mile in someone’s shoes” suggests that empathy and understanding grow when one sees or experiences what another person faces. Spending an hour with a postal worker, whether walking or driving or sitting with a window clerk, is an eyeopener to the challenges they face and gives one an appreciation for the “everyday heroes” that they are.
