By Joel Thurtell
Sixteen minutes past seven. In the evening.
Mail’s still not here.
Our neighbors are disgruntled at being on the tail end of this motorized postal route. By two minutes after eight, it had arrived. I think I know what happened: Monday — yesterday — was a holiday. The preceding Saturday, there was hardly any mail — two pieces of bulk stuff. In the Paw Paw, Michigan, post office, where I used to work, they called it “bunk” mail. Pain in the butt, but had to be put up.
Okay, mail was light Saturday because either a clerk or a sub cased it. First-class mail sat in boxes on the floor. I know this scene well. Then on Monday, no mail was cased, but mail came in. Thus, by Tuesday, the regular carrier, back at work after a pretend holiday, had three days’ worth of mail to case. She got a late start and didn’t finish delivering mail till well after eight at night. By that time, my neighbors had called to complain. The carrier probably got chewed out. What the neighbors don’t understand is that it’s the system, not the letter carrier, that is screwed up.
The scenario reminds me of my first Freedom of Information request.
In more than 30 years of news reporting, I’ve made many, many requests for information, but my first FOIA had nothing to do with journalism.
And it got me fired.
I think of this period of my life from time to time when I talk to U.S. postal workers. I understand why it is that our mail sometimes comes late. Most people have no idea what a tough job it is to be a letter carrier, especially a rural letter carrier. If somebody sets a little jar with some coins and a scrawled note in their mailbox, you have to count out some stamps, make change and a note of it even if it’s 10 degrees below with snow drifting around your car. That’s the job I had for a short time in 1976 until Postmaster Richard Bangs of the Paw Paw, Michigan post office read my FOIA request, lifted his phone, dialed my number and ended my career as a letter carrier.
It was a short career, and yet it was way too long. I’ve had some crummy jobs, but the absolutely worst job I ever had was working for the U.S. Postal Service.
At the time, I was in journalism. But my Freedom of Information Act request had nothing to do with my job as a reporter for WMUK-FM, Western Michigan University’s 50,000-watt National Public Radio affiliate in Kalamazoo. If I was a radio reporter, you might wonder, why was I working in a post office? Well, because I was an UNPAID, or “volunteer”, radio reporter. You would not have known it had you tuned to 102.1 megahertz on your FM radio dial and heard my voice reporting on city council meetings or narrating feature reports, but I received no salary for my work at WMUK. I was told there was no budget for a reporter, but the editor trained me to edit my tape recordings, the engineers helped me voice my reports and the general idea was that I’d wind up with skills and recommendations that would get me a paying job in radio.
Fair enough, I thought. But those were hard times. Late in 1974, I’d come back from Africa and building a school and a well as a Peace Corps volunteer to find a recession that rivals the one we’re in now in 2009 for joblessness. My academic degrees were liabilities on job apps. Living on a friend’s fruit farm, my wife and I trimmed grapevines at 13 cents a vine through the winter of 1975, so when I heard the post office was in need of letter carriers, I took the postal service test, passed it, took the federal driving test and got my federal driver’s license. I was good to go. So I thought.
Postmaster Bangs offered to let me “learn” Rural Route Number One by coming in on my own time to sort (the post office term is “case”) mail. More volunteer work. That didn’t make me happy. But he promised to assign more work as I got to know the job. I believed him.
I’ll never forget the moment when Dick Bangs showed me the case for Route One. It was a monument to slovenly work habits and slipshod management. There were 10 large boxes full of mail that had not been delivered over a period of weeks. The “carrier of record” was out with surgery. His backup had run the route until she had an accident. All that unsorted mail had to be cased. (The case, by the way, consists of ranks and rows of pigeonholes that correspond in order with the addresses on the route. Ideally, each pigeon hole has a label with the postal patron’s name and address.) While all this backlog had to be cased, I would have to do it on my own time, because the post office could not legally pay me, I was told.
The case was a nightmare. I quote from the affidavit I later wrote in hopes the post office would pay me for all my off-the-clock hours working with that case. “The day I was hired, Supervisor Jean Perry showed me the case, pointing out that it was in bad shape. Many names were illegible, others were misspelled, and others were not on the case at all. The book containing names of persons on the route was in similar shape, but both the case and the book, Perry assured me, would soon be brought up to date.”
A clerk named Frank Johnson was assigned to help me, because the managers realized that there were going to be some difficulties getting the mail delivered. Speaking of deliveries, Postmaster Bangs handed me another surprise when he told me I’d have to drive my own car. This was not good news. At the time, my car was a light blue 1965 Plymouth Valiant, a small car not meant for the work the post office assigned us on Saturday, January 3, 1976.
Paw Paw is in western Michigan’s fruit belt and its climate is great for orchards. Lots of cloudy nights due to lake effect weather from Lake Michigan mean higher overall temperatures, which helps the trees and buds, including those on grapevines, survive the winter. It also means big snow dumps, and on January 3, we had a huge snowfall. I observed Frank Johnson case the mail, strapping it with a leather belt when he’d finished, and also putting in markers to remind himself when he’d reached a house where a package needed to be delivered. Last thing a letter carrier wants is to arrive back at the PO and find a stray package bouncing around the car.
The case is kind of a theoretical model in the post office building that is supposed to reflect in its abstract way the reality of the layout of roads and mailboxes on the actual route. If the Route One case was a monument to sloth, the real world condition of the mailboxes was a ticket to the insane asylum. Rural route customers are supposed to have their names and addresses on their mailboxes, which lined the mostly gravel roads on the route. But the “carrier of record,” now out from surgery, had been even more casual about getting people’s names on the boxes. As we labored my little Plymouth Valiant through snowbanks, getting out to push now and then when it got stuck, Frank would lean out the passenger side with a long snow brush, sweeping snow off mailboxes to see if there was a name. More often than not, the box was blank, or the name didn’t correspond with the current resident.
That day, we started at 6 a.m. with the case, and got back to the post office at 5:30 p.m. It was not supposed to take that long, and Postmaster Bangs was not pleased.
Postmaster Bangs was not happy with his new emergency substitute rural letter carrier. That was clear from the get-go.
Postmaster Bangs told me to come in at 6 a.m. Monday, off the clock, and watch Clarace, another sub, case the mail for Route One. She would run the route, and while she was out, I was to case the backlog. When I went in that Monday, the plan had changed, though I didn’t know it. The carrier of record for Route Four was out sick. Clarace Miller, who was supposed to run Route One, was instead going to run Route Four. Frank and I were to run Route One. But I wasn’t told this right away. According to my affidavit, Frank cased mail while I helped by looking up names on letters in the route book: “Many difficulties because many names not on record,” I wrote. I was working supposedly on my own time when eventually Johnson let me know he and I were going to run the route using my car. That meant, at least, that I would be paid.
There was so much snow that my little Valiant was often stuck on the 65-mile route. I was packing a shovel, and there were two of us. Later, on my own, I found those rural lanes could be lonesome places. There were long stretches with no houses. Still, delivering the mail was less stressful than working in the post office.
The pressure was on me to come in on my own time and case that backlog, supposedly so I’d learn the route. On January 8, I spent eight hours on my own time casing current and backlog mail. On January 12, I put in two hours on my own time, but Supervisor Perry told me I needed to be working longer (unpaid) hours as practice for my forthcoming solo run of the route. If I did well that first time, I’d get to run the route all the following week, for pay.
“You should be putting in more than two hours per day,” Perry told me. “You can’t really learn the case in a couple hours a day. You’ve got to be at it eight hours to really learn it.”
The solo run didn’t happen. Once again, I drove and Frank Johnson brushed snow off boxes and stuffed them with mail.
The stress was awful. I’d never before had a job where I couldn’t work to speed and satisfy my bosses. At the post office, nothing I did was right. Everything about me seemed to buck their conventions. What was a radio reporter doing casing mail in a post office? I was in the Peace Corps? Left-liberal, right? My wife kept her surname when we got married? Very suspicious. How could they know that we were really married?
I could feel my face heat up as I’d take criticism from supervisors about my alleged slow casing of mail. On my own time! But they would interrupt often. One day, I worked on my own time for an hour and a half casing mail, while several times Supervisor Perry and Postmaster Bangs stopped at the case to talk to me about speeding up. Yes, always on my own time. Two days later, Supervisor Perry said, “Your casing is extremely slow…Dick (Bangs) counted your mail after you left Tuesday and in two hours, you put up less than — pieces. That is poor.” In my affidavit I didn’t recall the number of pieces she cited. But I wrote, “Note that I was not in the post office for two hours,…but only 1 1/2 hours, that I was on my own time, did not know I was being tested, and was interrupted frequently by post office personnel.”
I recall a time when I discovered that while I was casing mail off the clock, Postmaster Bangs was standing to the side, out of sight with a stop watch, counting the pieces of mail as I put them in their slots.
I knew there was a lot wrong with this picture, believe me. But the postmaster and others kept alluding to all the work they’d give me once I learned Route One. Problem was, the case was still a mess, more second and third class mail was landing in those cardboard boxes and I felt like I was on a treadmill. No effort was being made by anyone to get customers to put their names on their mailboxes. And I had to keep driving the route with my old Valiant, a low-slung little car that was not made for busting snowbanks or the mucky ruts that developed during occasional thaws.
Our other car was a Dodge Polara. I forget the year. It was bigger than the Valiant. It was so big, a friend nicknamed it “the squad car,” because it looked like it would make a good police cruiser. The squad car had a more powerful engine, but it had some little quirks that made it less than ideal as a mail car, or for that matter, any kind of car. No matter which auto shop worked on it, nobody could seem to make the car stay running as you slowed down to go through an intersection. You’d approach a turn, and as you let up on the gas, the engine would kill. A real pain in the ass. And then the transmission gave up the ghost. On advice of a friend, we took the squad car, a Dodge, to the Ford dealer in Paw Paw, who said he’d be glad to fix the trans. Which they did. Now I decided to try the squad car on Route One.
Those forays with Frank Johnson were very interesting. Frank was a talker. He was a military vet and a member of the American Legion. He was also a Mason. I learned from Frank that there was a network of vets working in the post office, and they liked to help each other. Ditto the Masons. There were Masons working at all levels of the post office, so if you were a Mason working in Paw Paw, say, and you needed or wanted to move to, say, Grand Rapids, why, that was no problem. You just called a Mason in the Grand Rapids Post Office and let him know who you were and what you wanted.
Pretty nice deal. If you were a vet, or if you were a Mason. I was not a vet or a Mason. The Peace Corps? It was regarded as a leftist outfit. I also learned that my score on the post office test had trumped the scores of a couple of American Legion guys, even though they were given an extra five points to increase their chances of being hired. Masons didn’t get extra points, but once in the system, they had advantages.
One of the first things I learned, and learned well because it was told to me by several postal workers, was that those slots high on several walls of the post office were for postal inspectors to secretly look through. They would come in without notice and watch clerks and carriers at work to see if anyone was stealing mail or otherwise breaking the rules. What I didn’t know then was that I was in violation of the law.
We lived in an old farmhouse on Paw Paw Road on Route One. When I put our mail in the box or stopped to leave it on the kitchen table, I knew I was about half done delivering the mail. I’d proceed on, and it was during a stop to put mail in a box near Three Mile Lake that I learned why it’s not such a good idea to have a Ford dealer work on a Chrysler transmission.
Lots of times, people didn’t plow out their mailboxes. There was a lot of snow, and a tall snow bank, and I’d jockeyed the squad car up so I could reach through my passenger window, open the mailbox and shove the letters inside. The grill and bumper of the squad car were less than a foot from a wooden utility pole. As I leaned back inside the car, my foot slipped off the brake and the squad car lurched ahead, hitting the pole. There were two noises. There was the sound of the squad car tunking the pole, because it didn’t hit hard. But there was a second sound that seemed to come from underneath the car. I put the transmission into reverse and hit the gas, planning to back away from the pole.
I heard a loud rattling sound from under the squad car. I put it in park, got out, leaned down and peered under the car. Have you ever seen a car’s drive shaft? The Polara was a rear-wheel drive car, and the shaft connected the transmission at the rear of the engine with the universal joint at the rear axle. Except this drive shaft was no longer connected to the U-joint. It was lying on the ground.
In those days, there were no cell phones. I found a house where the owner let me use the phone. I called the Ford dealer. They sent a truck out to tow the squad car, with its load of still-undelivered mail, back to the repair shop in Paw Paw. Turned out, they’d connected the shaft to the U-joint with Ford parts. Apparently, that doesn’t work so well. The dealer let me have a loaner car. I put the mail in the back seat and headed back to Three Mile Lake to finish delivering the route.
I don’t know if Postmaster Bangs noticed I was a bit late getting back to the post office that day. But it hardly mattered in the scope of my career as a letter carrier. The bosses’ main thing was getting all those boxes of unsorted mail to customers at no cost to their budget. I’d be working on my own time, and Bangs would say, “Got all your first class up?” I was the mark in that little scam. I knew what was going on. But they held out promises of work, once I learned the route. I don’t remember how much the post office paid, but it was better than 13 cents a grapevine.
So, day after day, I worked on the backlog and finally, on January 27, 1976, I finished it. The bosses had promised to put me on full-time once I’d finished the backlog, but now they told me I’d get half-time work. They were giving the other days to Clarace, a longtime sub. Next thing I knew, though, they were giving all but two days to Clarace. Now that the backlog was finished, they’d apparently had second thoughts about employing me even halftime.
I believe that tactic is called “bait and switch.”
As an emergency temp, I was not eligible to join the Rural Letter Carriers Association. But I called the union rep in Kalamazoo. He listened to my story, then responded, “It’s against the law for you to be in the post office if you’re off the clock.” Not only was I in violation, but Postmaster Bangs and Supervisor Perry were also in violation. Stop working off the clock, he said.
Second thing he told me was to buy a little notebook and start writing down everything anyone told me. If the postmaster stopped to chastise me for being slow or whatever, write it down. I bought a little notebook and kept it in my shirt pocket. And every time Postmaster Bangs or Supervisor Perry spoke to me, I pulled that notebook out and wrote down verbatim what they said and what I said. Later, I would compile my notes into an affidavit to be submitted with a claim for unpaid hours.
Third thing he told me was, file a FOIA for my hours and wages.
By February, I was running Route One solo, but not often. Meanwhile, the harassment (the union guy told me that was the word) kept up. On March 6, 1976, I asked Postmaster Bangs and Supervisor Perry for records of my hours and wages. At the end of the day, they gave me a slip of paper from an adding machine. No dates, no times. Impossible to comprehend what it meant. Another time when I asked for my records, Bangs told me the FOIA didn’t apply to the postal service. Perry told me my records were in Kalamazoo. That they were lying two ways didn’t help me get the records.
On March 11, I sent Postmaster Bangs my FOIA letter.
On March 17, the postmaster called me at home. “We won’t be needing your services any more.”
A few months later, Postmaster Bangs handed me one of the finest compliments of my life. No, it was not the check for back wages he was forced to cut from his local post office budget. By that time, having had the post office refuse my request for records, I’d contacted a freshman congressman named David Stockman, who began asking questions of the Postal Service. I think Stockman’s attention forced the post office to pay up.
What did I learn from this that would serve me as a reporter? I learned that FOIAs don’t always work, that even if you are legally entitled to records, officials may refuse to hand them over. Then what do you do? You have to pursue your course through other means. In this case, since pay was primary and work records were a means of getting the check, once I got my money, the records were irrelevant. As reporters, our stories are in those records. They are prime. Still, if they are denied to us, we need to explore other means of getting them.
I also learned how important it is to take good notes, even of seemingly trivial utterances. Good notes with direct quotes made a difference in my case. The quotations made my claim credible. They turned out to be powerful, because when confronted by higher postal officials and outside authorities with their own words, the officials who were harassing me had to pay up.
I learned that a union would help me, even if I could not be a member.
Oh yes, the postmaster’s compliment?
I was in Dick Bangs’ office in the Paw Paw Post Office months after all this happened. He’d just handed me the check for my back pay. I’d been told that the money came out of his Paw Paw budget.He was worked up, and his anger showed. There was silence. I was getting up to go.
Then he blurted out, “Joel, are you a lawyer?”
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
