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Neither Snow Nor Rain

Page 23

by Devin Leonard

Campbell, DHL’s attorney, went along too and also has fond memories, “Son of a gun,” he says. “We convinced Charlie Wilson and the subcommittee. He came back to Washington and basically told the postal service, You guys better wake up and get real or we’re going to ram it down your throats. That’s when the postal service caved in.” That November, Bolger reluctantly announced the suspension of the USPS monopoly on what it described as overnight letters delivered by 10 am. As a result, Federal Express started its much-publicized overnight letter business.

  Bolger vowed to aggressively compete, but the postal service’s Express Mail couldn’t keep up with Federal Express. The USPS no longer had its own fleet of airplanes. Instead, it relied on commercial airlines to handle its overnight mail, and they took care of their passengers first and treated the mail like an afterthought. Federal Express guaranteed delivery by the following morning. The USPS could promise it only by 3 pm. Private carriers picked up packages and envelopes at the homes and offices of their customers; the USPS charged an extra $5.60 for pickup. By the mid-1980s, Federal Express was the largest overnight air express company in the United States, with $1.72 billion in sales. UPS, which had purchased jets and built its own hub in Louisville, Kentucky, was second with $675 million, followed by Purolator with $590 million. The USPS was in fourth place with $500 million.

  Federal Express undermined the USPS in other ways too. Roger Frock recalls, “When the kids in our marketing department talked to customers about the postal service, in general, they said, ‘The sleepy old Post Office. They do it at their own pace, and if it goes across the country it’s going to take three to five days no matter what.’” As a result, Federal Express ran a television commercial in 1982 with two actors portraying a pair of overweight clerks who discuss their pensions while a customer desperate to mail a letter tries to get their attention. Finally, one of the clerks pulls the window shade down in the man’s face, forcing him to go to a nearby Federal Express office. Bolger sent Fred Smith a furious letter demanding that Federal Express pull the spot; Federal Express refused. “We’re just taking a commonly accepted attitude, such as the perception of postal workers, and having fun with it,” Francis X. McGuire, a Federal Express spokesman, said. “I’m sorry to hear Mr. Bolger feels that way.”

  The American Postal Workers Union responded with a commercial celebrating the USPS and its employees. “One hundred and ten billion pieces of mail a year! Who in the world handles all that?” an announcer asked. But the USPS itself remained silent. “Our strategy was, ‘Let it die. Let it go,’” says John Nolan, a former deputy postmaster general. “Unfortunately, it didn’t die very fast. Some of those jokes hit us very hard.”

  The Federal Express campaign reflected the changing image of the postal worker in popular culture. In September 1982, the CBS sitcom Cheers debuted, featuring Cliff Clavin, a Boston letter carrier played by John Ratzenberger. The show’s creators initially thought Cliff would appear only in the first season of Cheers, but the audience liked him so much that he became a permanent member of the ensemble. His uniform now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum. But unlike the streetwise postal workers who rescued Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street, Cliff seemed slightly damaged. His obsession with the postal service’s rules was a running joke on Cheers along with the immense pride he took in his mundane job, but the audience laughed at Cliff rather than with him. He was lovable, but a bit pathetic.

  In hindsight, this sad image of the postal worker seems to have been tailored for the Reagan era, when Americans became increasingly distrustful of federal institutions that had once been sacrosanct. Elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan, a Republican from California, famously told an audience at a press conference the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” His aides called for the privatization of Medicare, public housing, Amtrak, and the USPS. James Miller, a Reagan appointee who served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, became the chief evangelist of privatizing the postal service by abolishing the agency’s monopoly so it would be forced to compete with private companies. Miller didn’t seem worried by the old argument that private couriers could take the agency’s most lucrative, urban routes and leave it with the money-losing rural ones. “Private enterprise will get the mail delivered just as it did in the Old West,” he argued.

  But Miller’s vision of postal privatization was just the pipe dream shared by handful of libertarian ideologues. Reagan had to deal with a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, whose leaders were allied with the postal workers’ unions that were dead set against it. The USPS was also in a much stronger financial position than it had been in the 1970s. Bolger’s presorting discounts had spawned the modern direct mail industry. Junk mailers started cross-referencing zip codes with census data, identifying the most desirable neighborhoods and blanketing residents with sales pitches.

  In 1982, the USPS delivered 114 billion pieces of mail, or 494 per capita. Of that number, 62 billion were letters, but junk mail was becoming a bigger part of the mix. A decade earlier, it had been 25 percent of the mail. Now it accounted for 32 percent. The postal service’s residential customers might have had mixed feelings about the growing number of ads in their mailboxes, but the USPS generated a surplus of $802 million and announced that it would stop taking a federal subsidy starting in 1983, two years ahead of schedule. After more than a decade of woes, the U.S. Postal Service finally had something to celebrate, but for how long?

  10

  Going Postal

  It was still dark at 6:27 am on Wednesday, August 20, 1986, when Mike Bigler pulled into the employee lot at the post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he worked as a letter carrier. He had purchased several boxes of doughnuts for his coworkers on his way to work, and he thought about asking Patrick Sherrill, another letter carrier who pulled up beside him in his blue Honda, to help carry the doughnuts, but Bigler changed his mind when he saw the dark look on Sherrill’s face. He thought it was strange that Sherrill had his mailbag in the front seat covered by a sweater and raincoat. What did Sherrill need the extra clothes for on a day when the temperature was expected to reach 95 degrees?

  Bigler shrugged and went inside. Sherrill was unusual; there was no other way to explain it. A 44-year-old former marine with a receding hairline and a mustache, Sherrill was constantly getting written up by his supervisors for being late for work, delivering mail to the wrong addresses, being rude to customers, and, once, for spraying a dog behind a five-foot fence with Mace. He muttered about taking revenge on his superiors. “I’m going to get even, and everybody’s going to know,” Sherrill told a fellow postal worker.

  Over the next half hour, the Edmond post office filled up with 73 people. Some of the postal workers gathered in the break room for coffee and Bigler’s doughnuts. Others stood at their workstations preparing the day’s mail for delivery and chatting with each over the rock and roll from a local radio station that was playing through the intercom system and turned up louder than some would have liked.

  Nobody noticed when Sherrill locked the rear doors and produced one of the semiautomatic pistols he was carrying in his sack. Without a word, he started firing at his coworkers. At first, people thought a prankster had set off firecrackers, until they heard screams and saw Sherrill’s victims fall to the floor. A trained marksman who belonged to the Oklahoma Air National Guard shooting team, Sherrill pointed his weapon around the room, picking people off, only pausing for a few seconds at one point to put in earplugs.

  Some postal workers, including some of the wounded, dived over the front counter and ran though the lobby doors into the parking lot. Two hid in the steel-reinforced vault used to store stamps. Many more lay on the floor playing dead, including Bigler, whom Sherrill shot in the back. “He wanted to slaughter us all,” Bigler would later say.

  In fifteen minutes, Sherrill killed 14 people and wounded six m
ore before he sat in a supervisor’s chair and shot himself in the head. When the police stormed the building, they found him dead on a floor littered with bodies, shell casings, and undelivered mail. It was the third-worst mass murder in American history and it had happened on the premises of the U.S. Postal Service.

  The incident at the Edmond post office became a national story. “Mailman Slays 14, Self, in Oklahoma Massacre,” the Los Angeles Times wrote. Time put it more succinctly: “Crazy Pat’s Revenge.” In the days that followed, the media reported that Sherrill had pointed a loaded handgun at an officer when he was in the Marines. He made lewd remarks and brushed up against women when he worked briefly at a low-level job at the Federal Aviation Administration in Oklahoma City. Sherrill had also previously worked at the Oklahoma City post office, where he would have been fired if he hadn’t quit first. Soon after, the Edmond post office chose Sherrill over 22 other applicants because he was a veteran, which gave him extra points on the postal employment exam.

  Four days after the shootings, Postmaster General Preston Tisch attended a memorial service for the slain workers at the Central State University football stadium. He told the audience of 3,500 people that there would be a moment of silence the following day at 4 pm at every post office. “At 40,000 post offices across the United States, our flag flies at half staff,” Tisch said. “At 40,000 post offices, men and women weep.” He maintained that the USPS had no idea what led Sherrill to slaughter his coworkers and would never know.

  Not everybody agreed. The same day, Sherrill’s friends and family buried his ashes a hundred miles away in Watonga, Oklahoma. On his grave, someone placed a bouquet of flowers from letter carriers in Irving, Texas, who had also sent a card with a disturbing message: “To those who understand what he went through as a carrier. No one will ever know how far he was pushed to do what he did.”

  The USPS found such talk absurd. Its spokespeople noted that there was little turnover at the postal service and a long list of applicants waiting for jobs. So how bad a place could it be to work? Supervisors blamed the unions for fomenting workplace tensions by using the grievance process to protect workers who were frequently absent or showed up on drugs. However, employees described the USPS as a Dickensian environment where managers drove them relentlessly to process ever growing amounts of mail and disciplined them for violating petty rules like whistling in the office and failing to hold letters at the proper angle. “These rules are set up to give them grounds for harassment,” said Robert McLaughlin, a clerk in Des Moines who was suspended for seven days for the latter infraction.

  It wouldn’t be Preston Tisch’s job to figure out what could make a letter carrier like Patrick Sherrill snap. A wealthy New York businessman, Tisch resigned in January 1988 after only 18 months on the job. It would be up to his successor, Anthony Frank.

  Little more than a week after he had taken the oath of office on March 1, 1988, Anthony Frank found himself onstage at the University of Notre Dame with President Ronald Reagan for the unveiling of a 22-cent stamp honoring the school’s legendary football coach Knute Rockne. Frank gave what he describes as a perfunctory speech. Then he listened as Reagan, who had famously played Notre Dame football star George Gipp in the 1940 movie Knute Rockne—All American, gave an autumnal speech that celebrated movies, sports, and his own presidency. When Reagan was finished, someone handed him a football. The 77-year-old president threw a perfect pass to a member of the university football team. “I’ve never forgotten this,” Frank says in a telephone interview from his home in Carmel, California. “He took that football, and he passed it to the guy. How many people could do that? Pick one guy out of 17,000 and throw him a football?”

  A tall, square-jawed Californian with dark, wavy hair, the 56-year-old became known as a dispenser of pithy sound bites himself. “He was an incredible spokesperson for the postal service,” says William Henderson, a regional manager in North Carolina at the time. “He was very articulate, and very bright, and he had a way of synthesizing what the postal service was doing in a way that was very digestible for the average guy. He would say, ‘We delivered enough mail today that if you had strung it piece to piece, it would have gone around the earth twice’ and things like that.”

  The son of a wealthy German bank owner, Frank and his Jewish parents fled Germany to escape the Nazis when he was six years old, in 1938. The family settled in Los Angeles, where Frank’s father became a broker for Merrill Lynch and a financial adviser to fellow German émigrés, such as author Thomas Mann and conductor Bruno Walter. After graduating from Dartmouth College, Frank worked in the financial industry himself, becoming president in 1971 of a small bank in northern California. He transformed it into First Nationwide, the country’s sixth-largest savings and loan, and sold it to National Steel for $281 million in 1980. When National Steel needed cash, Frank engineered the sale of the bank for $493 million to the Ford Motor Company. Frank became wealthy enough that he no longer needed a paycheck. Public service appealed to him now. When a member of the USPS board of governors asked if he would be interested in the job of postmaster general, Frank said yes. “I think of myself as a professional manager,” he told Fortune. “The Postal Service is the biggest management challenge in the U.S., maybe the world. For one thing, it is the most extraordinary anomaly; it’s so big that nobody sees it.”

  Frank plunged into his new job. He delivered mail with carriers in Louisiana and later appeared as one in an episode of the television show, Murder, She Wrote. He visited post offices where the employees hadn’t seen a postmaster general since the Depression. “People are hungry out in the field,” Frank said. “Some of them can tell you the last time a postmaster was there. ‘We had Jim Farley and I remember he said . . .’ and I’m thinking, ‘Good lord, Jim Farley!’” Frank wanted the postal service to purchase its own fleet of planes to compete better with Federal Express. He announced that the USPS would be opening “mini-post offices” in Sears, Roebuck department stores to boost stamp sales. He talked about reviving postal banking, which had been discontinued in 1966.

  Frank was also determined to ramp up the USPS’s automation program, which had been delayed yet again. In 1986, two postal inspectors had shown up unannounced at a USPS Board of Governors meeting and whispered something to Peter Voss, one of its members. Looking shaken, Voss stood up and followed the inspectors out of the room. The following day, he pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks from a lobbying firm trying to win a $250 million contract for optical character readers for a Texas company. The incident paralyzed the USPS’s automation efforts for a year and a half. When Frank arrived, only 38 percent of the mail was being processed by high-speed machines.

  Meanwhile, the USPS’s volume had risen to 160 billion items—or 656 per capita. Junk mail, which now made up 37 percent of the mail, continued to drive much of the growth, but the price of a first-class stamp climbed to 25 cents. Because of the slowdown of the automation program, the postal service had to hire more people to process all the extra mail. It had 833,486 employees now, and Frank predicted that if nothing changed, the USPS would have to add to another 125,000 people in the coming years. At some point, he warned, the system would become unaffordable, and the USPS would collapse.

  As far as Frank was concerned, the economic benefits of automation couldn’t be ignored. In one hour, 60 clerks could sort 36,000 letters by hand. It was a labor-intensive process that cost the agency $1,500. With mechanical letter-sorting machines, 17 workers could separate the same amount for only $540. But with optical character readers, the letters could be sorted by two workers at a cost of merely $108. The new machines also sprayed bar codes on letters, which made them fly through processing plants even faster. The optical character readers could now also read most handwritten addresses; the USPS had developed technology enabling it to decipher scrawls that would have stumped even the Dead Letter Office’s Patti Lyle Collins in the previous century. The machines took pictures of letters a
nd transmitted them to a remote facility where workers used algorithms to decipher the scribble. However, the optical character readers still couldn’t read anything on a colored envelope, which meant that vast numbers of greeting cards still had to be sorted by hand.

  Frank embarked on a $5 billion campaign to increase the number of these devices in postal facilities. At a meeting with his top aides, Frank came up with a slogan for it. He wanted to get 95 percent of the U.S. mail bar-coded by 1995. “95 in 95!” Frank said. This became his mantra, one that he preached to his managers, and large customers got further discounts if they bar-coded their own mail.

  The changes at the USPS were long overdue, but they sharpened tensions between Frank and the postal workers’ unions. Traditionally, letter carriers spent several hours in the morning sorting letters, cards, and magazines in the order in which they would be delivered. But now that the new machines did all of that for them, they had to spend more time on the street, which became a contentious point with the NALC. Even so, Frank maintained a good working relationship with the union’s president Vincent Sombrotto. A charismatic, white-haired New Yorker, Sombrotto was one of the firebrands at Branch No. 36 who had instigated the 1970 wildcat strike, but when he was elected the union’s president eight years later, he became a smooth Washington insider. “Vinnie was a piece of work,” Frank says admiringly.

  Occasionally, the two men lobbied members of Congress together. One time, they visited a senator from Minnesota who had also grown up in New York. “Vinnie stopped him in the middle of his sentence,” Frank recalls. “He said: ‘Seventy-Third Street.’ The guy was speechless. He said, ‘How did you know that?’ Vinnie said, ‘I grew up in New York. Each street had a different sound to it. I knew you were from Seventy-Third Street.’ The senator was dumbstruck—as was I.” Of course, there was always the possibility Sombrotto had looked the information up in advance. Either way, his conversational icebreaker had the desired effect.

 

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