Daphne Carmel, founder of Deliv, a Silicon Valley same-day package carrier, has an idea. “Amazon should just buy the postal service,” she says
In her early months on the job, Megan Brennan was doing her best to keep her sense of humor. She comes from a family of postal workers. Her brother Brian is a letter carrier in Pennsylvania, and he kids his big sister about the monthly videos in which she addresses her employees. “Do I have to watch these?” he asked her.
“Yes, you must,” Brennan told him. “It’s a condition of your employment.”
Epilogue
In late 2015, Evan Kalish had visited 6,557 post offices. He had 29,084 more to go, but it was getting harder for him to travel. He had a job working in the shipping department at a clinical genome testing company. He had a girlfriend, too; her name was Amy. Not long after they had become an item, Kalish drove her from Queens to upstate New York, where she had spent her childhood. It was a long trip; Kalish wanted to break it up with some post office stops. “You can have four,” Amy told him.
“Make it six,” Kalish said.
“Fine,” Amy agreed.
Evan and Amy found some off Route 17 along the Susquehanna River. They stumbled across one that had been closed after a flood a few years before and never reopened. There was another that looked like it had been abandoned years ago; it was like a ghost post office. There wasn’t even a mailbox in front of it now, just a faded community bulletin board that reminded them of when the building was the center of the town’s life. They also found a post office with two lovely murals from the New Deal. “I see why you like this,” Amy told him. “It’s really cool.”
Evan was elated. He couldn’t drag Amy along on one of those marathon days when he visited thirty post offices, but she was good for five or six as long as Evan reciprocated by doing something she enjoyed, like going to a party. “I’m more of an introverted person,” Kalish said. “Group events? I find them draining. Going to post offices is my way of recharging.”
Amy got a kick out of the attention her boyfriend received for his unusual hobby. He talked about it on NPR. Time magazine called to inquire about his quest. The Association of United States Postal Lessors, a lobbying group for landlords who have post offices in their buildings, invited Kalish to speak at its annual conventions in Las Vegas and New Orleans. The events could be gloomy; it’s not the greatest time to have the federal agency as a tenant. The landlords grumbled that the USPS was pressuring them to lower their rents because stamp sales were down. Kalish did his best to cheer them up with stories and pictures from his journeys. He also got to see a lot of great post offices on these trips.
Still, it bothered Kalish that he wasn’t making more progress, and he hoped to increase his count in 2016. He had visited post offices in 49 states, but he daydreamed of sending letters from United States post offices in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. He was seriously thinking about traveling to Alaska and hiring a bush pilot to take him to post offices that could only be reached by plane.
Meanwhile, Kalish squeezed in visits whenever he could. He was relieved to find that post offices in small towns were still open, but he couldn’t always get inside because the USPS had reduced their hours so dramatically. He felt as though he was witnessing the disappearance of a fundamental aspect of American life; it was just vanishing more slowly than he had expected four years earlier when Patrick Donahoe announced his closure plan. “A lot of post offices in small towns are open three or four hours a day,” Kalish lamented. “It’s more of a crapshoot when I’m passing through.”
On a Monday afternoon, he was driving home from a wedding in Cleveland on I-80. He hoped to push through to Queens without stopping, but he missed a turn and ended up on I-76. Kalish didn’t realize his mistake for 20 minutes, and by then, he was deep in southern Ohio. He was furious with himself until he remembered there were post offices in the area that he hadn’t been to yet.
He pulled off the highway and found four. One was a jewel from the New Deal. The postmaster took Kalish into her office. She opened her file cabinet and showed him old photographs of the building. Kalish knew he wouldn’t get home to Queens until late. He had to go to work the next morning, but so what? When he passed through Ohio again, would this post office be open? He couldn’t take the chance.
Acknowledgments
You never know where a story will take you, and it was in that adventurous spirit that I volunteered in early 2011 when Josh Tyrangiel, former editor in chief of Bloomberg Businessweek, said offhandedly that he was interested in a story about the U.S. Postal Service. I didn’t know the first thing about the USPS, but Josh knows a good story. This was no exception but it wasn’t easy. I spent three months reporting and going through several drafts before I got it right.
The story was entitled “The End of Mail,” and when it was published that May, it got more of a response than anything else I’d ever written. Whether they love it or hate it, people care about the postal service. It was clear that there was a bigger story to tell. I struggled with a book proposal for too long. My agent Adam Eaglin came along at just the right time and connected me with Jamison Stoltz, senior editor at Grove Atlantic. Jamison was enthusiastic about this project when we met in 2013, and his feeling about it has never waned, which has been enormously helpful, along with all his suggestions on how to make this a better book.
The USPS is a big topic. You need people to guide you as you try to figure it out. Jim Campbell, one of the world’s most respected experts on the mail delivery, was kind enough early on to send me four disks holding all of the annual reports of the postmaster generals to Congress dating back to 1824 and a wealth of other historical documents. I can’t thank him enough for doing that. Sue Brennan, senior media relations representative at the USPS, helped me find my way around inside the USPS. She couldn’t have been more supportive. I’m also grateful to Jenny Lynch, the postal service’s historian. Sue and Jenny functioned as a tag team, answering my questions about the colonial post and antebellum mail delivery the same day.
I spent a lot of time talking to USPS executives including U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan and her predecessors Patrick Donahoe, William Henderson, Anthony Frank, Paul Carlin, and Benjamin Franklin Bailar. They were so gracious, answering my dumb questions and telling me fascinating things. So were former deputy postmaster generals Michael Coughlin and John Nolan and many more former officials, whose stories I tried to bring to life in this book.
I got to know people at postal workers’ unions too. Jim Sauber, chief of staff at the National Letter Carriers Association, helped me understand the views of his members. I visited the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University, where Mike Smith was kind enough to provide me with his insightful interviews with former NALC presidents James Rademacher and Vincent Sombrotto, which I drew heavily on to write my chapters about the 1970 postal workers’ strike. Mike put me in touch with Jim Rademacher himself. Jim and I had a lengthy conversation in 2013. He is 92 years old and just as passionate about the postal service as ever. I’m grateful to him for sharing his stories. I also talked several times to Mark Dimonstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, and also relied on documents and press clippings from the late APWU president Moe Biller’s papers at the Taminent Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.
I had some fine researchers. Christine Bednarz clicked with the subject matter and spent hours at the Library of Congress, the USPS library, the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, and the Historical Society of Philadelphia gathering material. In the final stages, my friend Danielle Muoio retrieved articles for me and did important interviews when I was in the midst of rewrites.
Then there is my family. I dedicate this book to them not simply because I think they are the greatest. They put in a lot of work on it. My wife, Eileen, read most of these chapters early on and told me hard truths about them. I didn’t always want hear
them at the time, but she was invariably right, though it took me a while to accept it sometimes. We’ve been married for 28 years; sometimes it’s like that. Our daughter Faith transcribed taped interviews and seemed to instantly grasp arcane postal matters.
Our son Colin was more steeped in this project than anyone besides the author. Like his father, he became something of an expert on postal matter. He found old newspaper clips and did research reports on the Pony Express and the rise of private carriers like Federal Express and DHL. He transcribed countless interviews quickly and accurately and read most of these chapters, helping me strengthen them. Colin and I traveled together to Detroit and Washington, D.C., to do research. It was great fun to go to these places, get the work done, and then hang out. When can we do it again?
As I was writing, three of my talented editors at Bloomberg Businessweek—Bryant Urstadt, Nick Summers, and Jim Aley—read chapters and helped me improve them as they have done with many of my articles. And all my colleagues at the magazine were supportive in their own way from editor in chief Ellen Pollock on down. It’s a pleasure to come to work every day with such a great group.
Notes
All page numbers refer to the print edition of Neither Snow nor Rain. Please use the search feature on your reader to locate the text that corresponds to the note entries below.
Prologue
xi “I really got into it,” he says: Author interview with Evan Kalish.
xi There were 36,723 post offices in the United States: USPS, Annual Report 2008: Connecting People and Business, 27, http://www.prc.gov/docs/62/62761/annual_report-2008.pdf.
xiii Six days a week, its 300,000 letter carriers deliver 513 million pieces of mail: Postal Facts 2015, 12, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/postalfacts2015.pdf.
xiii the postal service has what it refers to as “shirt pocket” routes: Author interview with Patrick Donahoe, former U.S. postmaster general.
xiv In 2011, Oxford Strategic Consulting, an English firm, studied the postal services in developed countries: “Delivering the Future: How the G20’s Postal Services Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century,” Oxford Strategic Consulting, Executive Summary (December 15, 2011), 4.
xiv “Nobody aims to be a postal worker,” says Orlando Gonzalez, a letter carrier and union organizer in New York: Author interview with Gonzalez.
xiv Long before Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States, he was the postmaster of New Salem, Illinois: The United States Postal Service: An American History, 1775–2006 , USPS, November 2012, 9, https://about.usps.com/publications/pub100.pdf.
xvi “Why are they the way they are?” Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory asked in 1988: Mary McGrory, The Best of Mary McGrory: A Half-Century of Washington Commentary, ed. Phil Gailey (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2006), 270.
xvi “We are so diverse that only extraordinary means could have held us together when so many forces seemed designed to tear us apart,” Lawrence O’Brien, Lyndon Johnson’s postmaster general, said in an eloquent 1966 speech: “Address by Postmaster General Lawrence F. O’Brien Before the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Society of Magazine Editors,” U.S. Postal Service Library, April 3, 1967.
xvii By its own calculations, it owed nearly $73 billion in mid-2015: USPS, Form 10-Q, March 31, 2015, 4, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/financial-conditions-results-reports/fy2015-q2.pdf.
xvii “It is the one of the biggest businesses in the country,” President Harry Truman said in 1951. “And without it, the rest of the country would not be able to do business at all”: “Address Before the National Association of Postmasters,” Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, September 17, 1951, http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php/index.php?pid=442&st=&st1.
Chapter 1
1 The placard above the door on Second Street in Philadelphia said “The Sign of the Bible”: Walter L. Ferree, “Andrew Bradford: A Pioneer Printer of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 21, no. 3 (July 1954): 214, https://journals.psu.edu/phj/article/view/22356.
1 He had arrived the previous day after fleeing Boston: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Pocket Books, 1940), 31.
1 Bradford also operated a general store: Ferree, “Andrew Bradford,” 217.
2 He ran a general store on the premises: Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 128.
3 “I accepted it readily”: Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 117.
3 “He suffered greatly from his neglect”: Ibid.
3 13 American post offices: The United States Postal Service: An American History, 5.
4 The mail arrived once a week in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston: Ruth Lapham Butler, Doctor Franklin: Postmaster General (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company), 37.
4 “I would only add that, as I have respect for Mr. Benger”: “From Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, 21 May 1751,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0042.
5 Archaeologists have determined that by 1900 BC: Carl H. Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), 8.
5 Two centuries later, the Egyptian pharaohs created a network: Ibid., 10.
5 King Darius of Persia: Ibid., 3.
6 Many have assumed that this is the motto of the U.S. Postal Service, but the USPS doesn’t have one: “Postal Service Mission and ‘Motto,’” USPS, October 1999, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/mission-motto.pdf.
6 The Romans improved on the Persian system: Alvin F. Harlow, Old Post Bags (New York: D. Appleton, 1928), 18.
7 The Muslim caliphs established mail routes: John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-Mail (New York: Scribner, 2009), 26.
7 And when Marco Polo visited China in the late thirteenth century: Harlow, Old Post Bags, 48.
7 By 1297, the University of Paris had created one: Ibid., 32.
8 In 1516, King Henry VIII of England called for the creation: Royal Mail Group, www.royalmailheritage.com.
8 In 1635, King Charles I of England opened the Royal Mail to the public: Royal Mail Group, http://500years.royalmailgroup.com/gallery/opening-the-postal-service-to-everyone/.
9 The British government formalized the system in 1639, designating a tavern owned by Richard Fairbanks as the first colonial post office: The United States Postal Service: An American History, 4.
9 In 1673, New York’s governor Francis Lovelace established a monthly post between New York and Boston on a trail known as “the King’s Highway”: Ibid., 4.
9 Neale was an odd choice: Mike Atherton, Gambling (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006).
9 Virginia and Maryland refused: Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service, 48.
10 “This is to give notice that all persons in town and country”: Wesley Everett Rich, The History of the United States Post Office to the Year 1829 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 27.
10 Franklin set a bad example: Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 157.
11 they could split an annual salary of £600: Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 211.
11 So, even before their appointments officially went into effect: Butler, Doctor Franklin, 46.
11 They cut the time it took for a letter to travel from Philadelphia to New York: Ibid., 50.
11 Franklin created the Dead Letter Office: Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 213.
11 Franklin and Hunter borrowed £900: Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 157.
11 In 1760, the colonial post generated its first surplus: The United States Postal Service: An American History, 5.
12 he longed to run the colonial post by himself: Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 207.
12 They
decided to have riders carry mail at night: Ibid.
12 American postmasters requested a shipment of bugles: Butler, Doctor Franklin, 132.
13 “It is the practice in many other instances to allow the non-residence of American officers”: Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1 (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859), 270.
13 “If I should lose the post office”: “From Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, 22 June 1767,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-14-02-0113.
13 “In this they are not likely to succeed, I being deficient in that Christian Virtue of Resignation”: “To Jane Mecom, 30 December 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-17-02-0186.
14 As far as he was concerned, he had transformed the colonial post: Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4 (London: The Macmillan Company, 1906), 192.
14 “How safe the correspondence of your Assembly committees along the continent will be”: Ibid.
14 “The people never liked the institution”: Ward L. Miner, William Goddard, Newspaperman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1962), 128.
15 “As he had frequently threatened to resign his office”: Ibid., 149.
16 “When the English ministry formerly thought fit to deprive me of the office”: Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 9 (London: The Macmillan Company, 1906), 693.
16 “The most single-minded politicians could never long forget that there was a philosopher among them”: Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 745.
16 It operated 75 post offices and transported 265,545 letters on 1,875 miles of post roads: Pliny Miles, Postal Reform: Its Urgent Necessity and Practicability (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1855), 26, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044081924474;view=1up;seq=1.
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