Dismayed over USPS attacks

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If I were to write exclusively about all the stuff that dismays me I’d have to write five times a day through at least, well, dis May.

Zoom meetings, mask etiquette, fan-less sports broadcasts, Fauci-bashing, arid forecasts and the fact that any day now we’re bound to hear Paul McCartney sing, “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime!”

But there’s one dismay I simply can’t let go without addressing, and this is an address about things that require proper postage.

Quit sowing doubt about the United States Post Office!

I love the post office for all it’s shoe leather glories and nitty-gritty idiosyncrasies. Plus, its straight-faced bureaucratic administration makes it a dandy target for pranks.

Like the time I in 1996 when I mailed a set of false teeth.

Not false teeth in a box. Just false teeth.

It was part of a stunt story I was asked to do by rascally editors at National Enquirer. They wanted to see if the post office would deliver common — uncommon, really — items if the addresses were put right on the items, stamped, and just dropped without explanation in the corner mailbox.

Other items included a toupee, a coconut, a rubber snake and a big bag of goo. 

Delivery success rate? One hundred percent!

Every step along the way, the system indiscriminately treated each oddball item with the same due care as if it were a tax refund or other important government document.

The false teeth belonged to my late grandfather. He removed them from the mailbox, popped them straight into his mouth and began to devour multiple ears of corn on the cob.

Papa loved his fresh summer corn.

The inspiration for my next postal prank had a wintry cast.

I remember enjoying the kind of Florida lark where you want to rub it in to all your snow-bound buddies. To do so, in those pre-internet/live stream days you’d often resort to that charming staple, the scenic post card.

I bought about a dozen Florida-themed ones; about half with palm trees, beach scapes, manatees ’n’ shit. The rest were basically soft core porn, babes in bikini — fairly innocuous stuff. Nothing you’d think that would jolt the testosterone of your typical postal carrier.

But not when that postal carrier is, well, a typical male man.

Because I soon detected an obvious pattern. The sexy post cards were taking 5 to 7 days longer to get delivered than the scenic innocents — and most of the sexy’s had thumbtack holes in them.

The implications were clear: Some of the men were snatching the “Sunset Over Cleavage” pictures and securing them above their work stations so they could get their jollies while mind-numbing streams of bills, periodicals and other funtional mail went whizzing by.

Who could blame them?

I needed an official postal response as to why the sexies took longer.

“Pure coincidence,” was the answer.

I asked what would happen if we repeated the experiment.

“The men and women of the USPS would be grateful for your patronage.”

I asked how the thumbtack holes appeared in the fleshy ones, but marred not one the sexies. Did he consider that, too, a “coincidence.”

“No,” he said, never breaking character, “I’d say that was, er, flukey!”

I think my best idea regarding the post office wasn’t about making me money. Rather it could make them money.

Introducing vanity zip codes!

I reasoned that, like vanity license plates, local governments would pay extra for zip codes that matched their promotional themes.

The idea stemmed from dealing with my late mother’s dementia. She kept mailing us letters that never arrived. She was forgetting the zip code.

“It’s hard remembering five numbers,” she’d say.

She had dementia, but I remember thinking, you know, she’s right. It easier to remember one number instead of five.

It’s how we almost moved the whole family to tiny Newton Falls, Ohio, home to the easiest to remember zip code in the USA: 44444.

The only easier-to-remember number is likely 12345 in Schenectady, N.Y. Of course, living there would mean forever having to spell Schenectady and that would never do.

The link to the original post is down below. I’d encourage you to read it, as well as the other posts. Each fairly bristles with fresh insights, few of which are evident here.

I make no apologies.

I think readers will understand that when one writes about the post office it is unavoidable to every once in a while mail it in.

Related …

Zippity-do-duh! A postal money maker

For big profits, USPS needs to start delivering people

Goin’ postal over USPS decline

How I became junk mail

Why today you should write someone a letter

Return this decision to sender: Palmer stamp to be unveiled in Orlando, not Latrobe

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I’m painfully aware of the personal and professional consequences of using this blog — named the 32nd most influential blog for Amish readers — to ruffle the feathers of the braintrust behind one of the world’s most beloved and iconic brands.

But when a company worth in the neighborhood $700 million gracelessly stumbles over a 55-cent postage stamp then feathers must be ruffled.

The U.S.P.S. is March 4 unveiling the Arnold Palmer commemorative stamp in Orlando, home to Mickey Mouse, rather than unveiling it in Latrobe, home to, well, Arnold Palmer.

Do I blame the post office? I do not. I suspect they’re merely doing the ill-considered bidding of Orlando-based Arnold Palmer Enterprises.

I contend it diminishes the legacy of Palmer every time something is done to put space between him and the iconic place he called home. And make no mistake, Latrobe was home to Palmer, a fact that was essential to his enduring appeal.

Palmer was raised in a home that was 320 yards from the one where he was living when they took him to the Pittsburgh hospital where he died September 25, 2016. He was 87.

Think about that. A man who could have been pampered in palaces around the planet never left the defiantly proud shot & a beer steel town that raised him. Hell, he never left the same street.

I have some authority in the matter. In the 18-months since the release of my Arnold Palmer book — the one Palmer confidant Jim Nantz says is, ahem, the best book anyone’s written on Palmer — I’ve been privileged to befriend many of the most ardent Palmer fans.

Most of them are eager to play Latrobe C.C., buy some merchandise, and have a drink or two at the Tin Lizzy. Many of them remind me of my father so I love them and their soulful motivations before we’ve even met.

Like my father, they knew all about Palmer the golfer. They didn’t need to hear about which club he’d use from the 150-marker when there was a stiff wind in his kisser.

No, they wanted to hear what it was like when you ran into him in the grocery store, the barber shop, or the local tavern.

Sure, there are those kinds of stories in Orlando, pop. 1,923,000, but they’re just more concentrated — more potent — in Latrobe, pop. 7,885

In Latrobe, Palmer was a fixture; in Orlando, a tourist.

So why is the postal ceremony there, not here?

I can only speculate but part of it seems partly pure laziness. The decision makers all live there and the ceremony will coincide with the opening of the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill Club & Lodge. It’ll wind up as a 200-word items at the bottom of some notes column; NBC will daily run a 15-second spot.

That’s lazier than even the pampered golf writers they presume to woo. Guaranteed, they’d get more compelling and colorful stories if they at random chose a dozen golf writers and flew them to Arnold Palmer Regional Airport for an overnighter and a round of golf at LCC.

 The other part — and again I’m only speculating — is that the people who run Arnold Palmer Enterprises simply don’t believe in Latrobe. I think they’d like to shed some of the fiscal burdens of running what’s been called “sentimental aspects” of the Palmer legacy.

Who does believe in Latrobe? Palmer pal Gov. Tom Ridge who told me he envisions a day when people come to Latrobe to pay homage to Palmer the way they do in Orlando with Mickey whazisname.

“People are always going to want to see the town where Arnold Palmer grew up, see his workshop, his office, his memorabilia and play the course where he learned to golf,” Ridge says.

Oh, and I can think of one other guy who believed in Latrobe. Many of Palmer's most iconic marketing campaigns hearkened back to ol’ Latrobe.

What this town has to offer are assets, not burdens. To think otherwise is short-sighted. 

I apologize for once again ruffling feathers, but when top decision makers keep on acting like turkeys then a few feathers are bound to be ruffled.

Related Feather Rufflers …

Banned from Latrobe C.C. … Me!

I get screwed by Bay Hill … again

The day Palmer’s people offered me a $70k-a-year job

Biblical sorts of praise for my Palmer book

Time to change town name from Youngstown to Palmerville

This blog named 32nd best Amish blog in the world

Why today you should write someone a letter

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My daughter loves to get the mail. Getting a letter or postcard is a very special occasion to her. She treasures the correspondence.

She is 8. I wonder when she’ll out grow this childish affinity.

If she’s anything like her old man the answer is never. I still love getting the mail.

Let me rephrase that. I still love getting some mail.

I still love getting paychecks, notes and invitations to parties or places to visit. I love hearing from relatives. I love Christmas cards, birthday greetings and out-of-the-blue howdies from old drinking buddies.

That means I love getting maybe one item of mail out of every 500 pieces delivered to our home.

But like our Lucy, I understand there’s still a prospector’s euphoria in retrieving the daily mail. You never know what treasures it may bestow.

Circumstances have led me to a golden revival of letter writing.

It goes back to when I was deluged with letters from people thanking me for the book.

I kept each and every one of them and for a while they covered every square exterior inch of my office beer fridge. My favorite was from a woman, the mother of a dear friend, who said my book meant the world to her. She hadn’t been feeling well.

“I have very bad arthritis in my knees and for the past few months have endured some health issues,” she wrote — in very elegant cursive, by the way. “Some days I find myself getting depressed. But since reading your book I realize I’ve been living with only dark colored crayons. Your book’s changed my whole life.”

The woman was 98.

When I die and my greedy descendants go pawing through my things in search of stocks, land titles or maybe a tattered old map to buried treasure, they will find none of those things.

But they will find that letter.

I’ll keep it forever. It is to me a true treasure.

That darling woman died a few weeks ago, just shy of her 100th birthday.

Know what I did?

I wrote my friend a heartfelt letter about what her mother’s letter means to me.

She said she was very touched. I was hoping she would be.

When was the last time you sat down and wrote an honest-to-goodness letter to someone who matters?

Take it from me, it’ll make your day as much as it does the recipient’s.

I’m actually binging on the humble act these days.

In fact, I just sent a letter to Nigeria.

It was tucked inside a crayon-signed copy of the book. Tayo Akano read about the book and e-mailed a request that I send him a free copy, as the book on page 1 promises I’ll always do.

Or is my Tayo a she? I haven’t found an artful way to ask. My research reveals Tayo is a unisex name — like Chrissie! — associated with the West African language Yoruba. One site says Tayos are known for their generosity and sexiness.

Hello, Tayo!

It costs $18.89 to send a letter and a $15.95 self-help book roughly 5700 miles from Latrobe to the city of Ilorin in Kwara, Nigeria. Whether it’ll ever get there remains a mystery.

It’s impossible to calculate the descending levels of indifference in the 100 or so postal workers who’ll need to display international competence for my letter to get from me to my sexy new friend.

They said it would take 18 days to arrive. Today will be Day 33 of the book’s odyssey, one I’m sure Homer — the poet, not the Simpson — would appreciate.

What if in two months the book has still yet to arrive?

I’ll try all over again.

I’m lately writing bunches of business letters, too. I’m finding they’re incredibly useful introductory tools.

Think about it: How many nondescript e-mails do busy executives get each day? Fifty? A hundred? More?

What could be more boring than daily sifting through that great, gray electronic muck?

Then my letter lands on their desk. It’s beautiful. He or she can pick it up. The name on the letterhead is catchy, intriguing. Each letter is signed in vivid crayon.

What could be more day-brightening?

I know.

A letter that asks for nothing. When it’s a meeting planner I’m hoping will hire me to speak to their group, I basically say hello, I’m not here to burden you, but I have something that’ll make you smile. If it does, check out my website. If that, too, makes you smile, please get in touch.

“And that’ll make me smile.”

Works like a soft-sell charm.

I think it’s because we’ve all become so defensive about being inundated with communication that is monolithic, impersonal and so artificially chipper.

With each e-mail blast, with each social media birthday greeting, the demolition of our once-charming interpersonal communication harshly proceeds.

I advise you to today set a moment aside and just jot down a little note to an old friend, a teacher or someone with whom you once shared some laughter or maybe an illicit little boink. 

It’ll make their day — yours, too. I promise.

See, when it comes to just how much an old-fashioned letter can mean to our whole lives and the letter’s unique ability to touch special places deep in our souls, I’m just like my 8 year old daughter, the one who looks forward each day to visiting the mailbox.

A really good letter is something we get.

Related . . .

For big profits, USPS needs to start mailing people

Fraudulent address labels paying off for Rev. Rodell

Whining over postal liquor restrictions

ZIP-ity-doo-duh: A postal money maker

Why do so many things these days suck so bad?

Goin' postal over USPS decline

I find myself seeking odd reasons to run to the post office to spend money, as if my meager purchase of $8.80 worth of Homer Simpson stamps is going to save the 236-year-old institution that is hemorrhaging $10 billion a year.

That’s how on August 19 I found myself in the Latrobe, Pennsylvania, post office filling out forms and paying big postal bucks to send a 2-pound, 5-ounce, pile of Arnold Palmer Kingdom golf magazines and a book to Brazil.

It’s probably been 10 years since anyone over the age of 10 raced to the mailbox for anything.

My postal heyday was about 15 years ago. I was working for an array of publications and every day would bring fresh reason to rush to the post office in hopes of finding treasure. Paychecks? Magazines featuring my work? Reader letters?

Our PO Box was a five-minute walk from our home. I’d make that stroll everyday at precisely 10:15 a.m. Nothing -- neither rain, nor sleet, etc. -- could keep me away.

In those pre-e days, snail mail brought daily delight.

It is the same post office where the great Palmer himself receives his mail. Palmer, 82, still gets about 20 to 30 autograph requests each and every day. He personalizes and autographs pictures and even pays the postage to return the keepsakes to every corner of the globe.

I wonder: if Palmer had been a typical jerk athlete, would the USPS have gone belly up in 1999? The man’s been a swingin’ postal stimulus package.

I grew up knowing a string of friendly and fit postmen. They’d spring up the steps and offer the mail and an always hearty greeting.

They were so pleasant and cheerful I was shocked to find in the early 1990s that a surprising number of postal employees harbored a homicidal bent and “going postal” became shorthand for work place rage.

Then the inept mailman as stereotype came along with Cliff Claven from “Cheers,” and Newman from “Seinfeld.”

Even those indelible boobs couldn’t diminish my postal affections, especially after I realized the USPS could be an unwitting foil in lucrative pranks.

I was in Florida for a winter frolic in 1994 and, as always, picked up a handful of postcards to taunt my snow-bound friends. To my sweetheart, I mailed one with an idyllic picture of a sunset over the Everglades. She got it in three days.

To my buddies, I sent ones like the alligator nipping at the babe’s bikini bottom. Those took 7 to 10 days and most arrived with little pin holes in the pictures.

Clearly, under-sexed postal employees were lifting the sexy postcards from the flow and posting them for daily ogling.

So I turned in a lead to National Enquirer about how sexy postcards take longer to get delivered than scenic ones. They paid me $1,000 to conduct the research, which involved mailing two postcards -- one sexy, one scenic -- to 20 buddies around the country.

On average, the sexy ones took seven days longer to be delivered.

Thus inspired, I began thinking of other ways the USPS could work for me, a tabloid reporter eager to tweak institutional authority.

I was assigned a story that eventually ran under the headline: “The Post Office REALLY Delivers!” It involved stamping and addressing unusual items to see if the post office would treat it with the same efficiency as a business letter.

Of course, it did. It’s always been very professional, even when confronted with mailing things like coconuts, rubber snakes and big bags of goo.

Understand, those items were not in boxes. We addressed and stamped the actual items. I still fondly recall the non-plussed look on the businesslike post mistress’s face when I handed her a set of false teeth with my grandfather’s DuBois, Pa., address on them.

Money, medicine, legal documents and illicit love letters -- you could always count on the post office.

That’s why I spent a good part of the late summer stewing.

It all started when straight out of the blue I got a call from a blog reader from Brazil. His name’s Bob McCarthy, an ex-pat American.

The fact I have a regular reader in Brazil delights me. The fact that he called to announce his existence delights me even more. We had a great friendly chat.

Turns out Bob’s a golfer and a big Arnold Palmer fan. So I decided to do a good deed.

I do more of these than I let on. I help old ladies cross busy streets, retrieve cats from trees and advise Republican presidential candidates on how best to dispense with unseemly news firestorms.

Lately it’s been Herman Cain.

But for Bob I decided to send him some copies of the posh Palmer magazine, Kingdom, for whom I write, and a copy of my 2004 golf ace book.

I filled out all the forms, swore in writing the package didn’t contain anthrax or stink bugs and pushed it across the counter. The lady asked if I wanted insurance.

I gulped. It was already going to cost $21.39. Another $11.50 stretched my generosity to beyond its limit.

So I rolled the dice and said nope. She said it would take about 12 days to get to Brazil.

Well, two weeks passed and I didn’t hear from Bob. Then a month. Then two months.

And it gnawed at me. Was it stolen? Did it get destroyed? Could Bob be as rude as the writers of blogs he enjoys?

None of the above.

Bob called about a week ago to thank me.

“Yeah, the Brazilian postal workers are in a labor dispute and they always go on a big slowdown before they strike.”

So I’d like to salute the USPS and all their foreign brethren. You helped me make Bob’s day for just $21.39, a intercontinental bargain.

Despite its funding woes that seem destined to doom it, the USPS came through for me again.

I couldn’t be any happier than if I’d raced to the mailbox and reached inside to find somebody’d mailed me a great big bag of goo.