My legal career spanned five decades and encompassed an eclectic variety of practice settings by the time I retired from the last of these, in the Chicago office of the USPS General Counsel. My USPS pension forms an indispensable part of my retirement income, and my law practice there left me with a deep and abiding appreciation for the culture of the organization and its people.
The corporate culture was simple and always had been, based on a few expectations, many of which reached as far back as the very origins of the venerable institution: Show up, on time. Follow the rules and instructions. Work hard. Treat others with dignity. Respect your coworkers and supervisors. Sort all the mail. Deliver all the mail. Serve every address. Finish your route/shift on time. Pay attention. Be flexible. Stay safe.
My Postal Service was a unique public institution with a purpose tantamount to a sacred duty. Universal Service was the paramount mission. Perhaps, in many ways, the organization imitated the structure and functions of a private enterprise, e.g. both companies might hire, fire, train, manage people, buy, sell, and account for their income and expenses. But it was the differences that made the Postal Service special. After all, it’s America’s only company that the Federal government has the express power to create, spelled out in the Constitution.
But my Postal Service is dead. murdered by a corrupt President and his unscrupulous apparatchik who used the vantage of the Postmaster General to pull off the hit after decades of Republican shenanigans had weakened the victim. This affects me emotionally to an extent I hadn’t anticipated. I’m not exactly the kind of employee who easily slips into a company culture like the one at the Postal Service. You could say we were an unlikely pair. Yet, fairly quickly, I came to deeply appreciate the people, the ideal, at least, of the organization and the importance of the institution in serving as the sinew of the nation.
But the Postal Service I knew is dead, and, so, I offer this eulogy.
The Postal Service and I go back a long way. I was two when my parents divorced in the early 1950s and Mom moved us into the home of her younger sister, where I slept on a trundle in a utility room off the kitchen. Uncle Chester had built the house himself on seven acres where he cultivated iris and lilies and kept chickens for meat and eggs. He also worked as a letter carrier on a 100% walking route in Kirkwood, Missouri. Its good they didn’t let him drive a vehicle because he was the worst driver I ever knew. Hell, when I was three he backed his Plymouth over me leaving me with a head injury, plus compound fracture of my left humerus that put me in traction for six weeks.
Uncle Chester’s Post Office job was sort of part of our daily life. I can still remember going with him to the chicken coop to collect the eggs that he sold to people on his mail route. So, I had a child’s understanding of, and an acquaintance with the Post Office (as it used to be officially called) long before I could even write.
Pretty soon, I could write letters, and wrote many as I was growing up. Although we never saw my father alive again, Mom made a point of keeping in contact with some of his brothers and sisters and their families, all of whom lived on one of the seacoasts while we lived in Missouri. So, from early on, I had reason to write letters. Later, my friend, the Postal Service, took my college applications out and brought back the acceptances. Then, when the exigencies of the Vietnam war sent me to the sea in US Navy ships, letters alone allowed me to stay in contact with my new bride back home.
While I was there, a letter carried my law school application and brought back the acceptance that changed the course of my life and put me on a path that eventually placed me inside nearly the topmost levels of USPS management and gave me responsibilities for matters involving most aspects and levels of the organization.
There are a few people, but not many, to whom I have been so closely tied for a lifetime in so many important ways, as I have been to the Post Office. I feel like I have lost a friend.
America will no more, ever, see the like of the U.S. Postal Service, no more than all the kings horses and men will ever again see Humpty Dumpty. It is gone. Whatever comes after will be something else.
It took them a while to get it done, but Republicans have murdered my old friend. There oughta be a law.
Let us pray.