Amanda here. Dad has let me take over the blog for a day to post an essay I wrote a year ago about my fondness for the Postal Service. Sadly, several of the proposed changes I discuss below have already been made. In honor of Ben Neville and James Neville LeDuke and all the other postal workers out there, write a letter today. You'll make someone smile 3-5 days from now.
A Love Letter to the Post Office
I love the post office. I love their ability to get small, thin
envelopes from A to B in such a short time.
I love the annual feel-good stories of what happens to all the letters mailed to the North Pole, and the not-frequent-enough-for-my-taste anecdotes of
long-lost letters being delivered after getting stuck in a mail slot or under a
rotting floorboard for 80 years. I love
that a few months ago I received a letter addressed to a misspelled version of
my name, with the street name horribly butchered, and a wildly incorrect zip
code. Once, a boyfriend who was from the
Chicago area told me horror stories of the post office there being run by the
mafia, which is why his grandmother still sends him birthday checks in
non-birthday-card-shaped envelopes. That seems like an anomaly though. I choose to believe that the USPS is a
national cultural institution worthy of respect, relevance, and protection in a
world intent on turning everything into something that can be digitized, or
worse, profit-ized.
![]() |
Tiptonville, TN Post Office |
As part full disclosure, part
explanation regarding my fascination with the post office, both my grandfather, James Neville LeDuke,
and my great-grandfather, Ben Neville LeDuke were postmen, and my grandmother, Catherine LeDuke, carried the mail on
my grandfather’s route when he was in the Army during World War II. My grandparents lived directly behind the
tiny post office in Tiptonville, Tennessee, and I can still picture the blue
and white mail trucks coming and going during childhood games of hide-and-seek,
their fumes sometimes flushing us out from the bushes that separated their
house from the post office.



In 2010, those mail trucks drove
1.25 billion miles and the post office processed 171 billion pieces of mail, an
average of 23 million pieces an hour. Even today, it handles more than 40% of
the world’s mail. It has a fleet of
215,625 vehicles, the largest civilian fleet in the world, and has a larger
retail network than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart combined. There’s a post office that straddles the
border of Tennessee and Virginia, serving two different zip codes in the two
different states. In Gridley, Kansas,
the mail carrier has to travel 182.8 miles each day to deliver mail to just 258
mailboxes. In Peach Springs, Arizona, mule trains take mail and supplies down
an eight-mile trail to the Havasupai Indians at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

My dad came across these letters
several years ago when he was rummaging through their attic. Some were stored in a box in a crawl space,
others were in the bottom of a trunk.
None of them were meant to be read by anyone else, but he couldn’t
resist. My grandfather died in 1977, and
though my grandmother is still alive, she is 95 years old and cannot be counted
on to remember what she had for breakfast, much less to tell the stories of her
past. Together my father and I went
about the task of reading and organizing them.
First, the ones from 1936, before they were married, when he taught at a
boarding school across the state and dreamed of the day they would marry. We methodically scrutinized each one, made
notes, pulled out important passages, occasionally blushed, and learned the
story of their love and the average price of a carton of cigarettes. Then, the war letters, where each leg of his
two year journey began with a rambling note on a troop train. There is a
certain beauty in the fact that many of those letters involved discussions of
the post office: how long it took letters to arrive, how the families on the
route were doing, how many flat tires she’d had to change that month, which
meal he was skipping so that he didn’t miss mail call. Those letters are
fascinating not just for their peek into the mind of a
too-smart-for-his-own-good, semi-neurotic private in the army but, equally,
what life was like in a small town during the war, when women took over their
husbands’ jobs, dealt with butter and sugar rations, and waited for news of how
their life might change next.

The argument for the continued existence of the post office is not unlike the one made for the importance of art in our communities, or libraries: there are some things that are worthy of existing not for their money-making potential, or their absolute efficiency, but for their contribution to the civic culture. When you look at a retrospective of all the stamps through the ages, you see our history: cartoons characters and Presidents, cities and statesmen, industries and icons. A documentation of things that matter to us. And post offices may not be gathering places in the traditional sense, but they can be one of the only places to see neighbors, to connect with the community. For many in rural areas, they are a physical lifeline to the outside world. Then there are the cultural references: “going postal,” dogs and postmen, “Wanted” posters in the post office. The existence of the post office has sunk into our national consciousness and that fact should not be taken lightly. There are few things that have the continuity and the dependability of the post office. And even as the price of a stamp continues to rise, we should fight to keep it that way. Technology should be developed, but other forms of communication should still be protected. Treating the post office like a business misses the point that there is a relevance to the post office that goes beyond profit margins. Because the post office isn’t a business. It’s the post office.
*******
Amanda LeDuke
(Dad would love to hear from you...feel free to comment below, or click HERE to send us an e-mail.)
Great Post, Amanda. Folks you know a great way to honor Amanda's love of the Post Office and your love of Catherine would be to send her a card......Today......Through the US Mail. I'm dropping mine in the mailbox right now.
ReplyDeleteOh, Yeah............Just address it:
ReplyDeleteCatherine LeDuke
Behind the Post Office
Tiptonville, Tenn.