Follow the Mail Trail (Nov. 29, 1998)
Although it seems nearly irrelevant today, the notion that a letter traveling from, say, Montague to Northfield, would have to travel 50 miles out of the way first to Springfield and then back again, struck me as absurd, and so I became fascinated by the notion of following a piece of mail along its journey.
The blue iron mailbox lid clanks shut at 4 p.m.
The Greenfield-bound letter begins wending its way from Shelburne Falls to Springfield before reaching its destination 24 hours later.
Even in Peoria, Ill., believe it or not, a postal worker will play a role in delivering this jumbo envelope to a house on George Street, about 10 miles from where it was sent.
Fifteen minutes after the letter slips into the blueness of the “out-of- town” mailbox outside the Shelburne Falls post office, window clerk Bruce Britton empties a quarter-full, milky-white plastic mail tub.
Indoors, he begins sifting through the mail, separating out everything but letter-size envelopes. Out go oversize “flats” and the kinds of thick slugs and “spurs” (small parcels rolls and stuff) that could jam the machinery later.
Flats will be hand-canceled before they leave the Shelburne Falls 01370 post office, says Britton, who began his job just a few days before Christmas last year. He’s only heard second-hand how wildly busy mail- moving will get in coming the weeks.
According to Postmaster Erik Doty, the normal dairy flow of about 2,000 letters and roughly 300 flats out of Shelburne Falls should more than triple in the weeks ahead.
“It gets so, when you come in in the mornings, that you can’t even walk,” says Doty, tall, thin and comfortably dressed in a maroon turtleneck. “We get swamped.” Doty and Britton rush to close up the post office and prepare for the 5:45 arrival of Tony, the contract driver. He drives up from Springfield with the mail each morning at 7:10, then heads on to Charlemont and Colrain, returning at 8:30 a.m. for the day’s first pickup. He’s back in the late afternoon for the second, final pickup.
Doty hurries to cover each of six tubs of first-class mail, placing them on one of three moveable metal racks. There are also three bags of priority mail, two bags of express mail hanging from the top, parcels and five cardboard trays of bar-coded business envelopes.
Just as phone calls or Internet communications may bounce staggering distances instantaneously just to reach the next town, mail is also routinely routed through regional hubs. A Bernardston-to-Brattleboro letter, for example, is sent to Springfield and then White River Junction, Vt. before reaching its destination.
“Some people think it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” says Doty, who’s worked for the postal service for eight years – including two at the Springfield General Mail Facility before coming to Shelburne Falls
“I’ve had people say, T can drive it and deliver it there faster myself!'” But reducing the number of times a piece of mail is handled saves the postal service $30 per 1,000 letters, he explains. It’s easy to see how that adds up when you see how much mail passes through Springfield.
Sprawling in Springfield
Sprawled along Route 20 in Springfield’s Indian Orchard section, the Postal Service’s 652,000-square- foot white cement terminal is two mammoth processing plants in one: the Springfield General Mail Facility and Bulk Mail Center. Only in Washington, DC. are these regional operations also housed together undo* one roof, says George Therrien, district operations manager.
The GMF, one of nine such regional centers in the Northeast, is the hub for roughly 115 post offices in western Massachusetts. Along with centers in Boston and Worcester, it’s the postal counterpart of the East I railroad freight yard, linking every post office with “011,” “102,” or “013″ zip codes, and all mail between western Massachusetts and the rest of the world.
Roughly 750,000 letters a night flow into this industrial-strength postal center – with much of that mail flooding in shortly after the 5 p.m. final collection at local post offices.
As the holiday season crescendos each year, the volume of letters doubles, beginning with mail-order catalogs that pump up the volume as early as September, and converting to cards in December. Parcels begin pouring into the center immediately after Thanksgiving, and keep up a fever pitch right until Christmas.
Ten minutes after mail is unloaded at the dock from the roughly 200 trailer trucks a day, hampers filled with letters are first dumped onto conveyor belts for rubber bands and other foreign objects to be removed by one of the center’s 2,000 employees.
They’re fed into one of three Advancer Facer Cancelers, which at the rate of nine letters a second, uses an infrared sensor to find the stamp and orient the envelope accordingly, so each stamp can be canceled.
Where the address is legible, it also adds a bar code along the bottom, which will be used later to direct the mail to the proper post office.
Magic in the mail
Now here a piece of magic enters the mail.
The George Street letter’s neatly hand-printed address, like those on thousands of others flying by at lightning speed, confounds the optical character reader. So using a phone line, it instantly sends a digital image to a Remote Encoding Center in Peoria, Ill. In orange ink, it also sprays the back of the envelope with an identifying code mat will be used later to find this particular letter from all the other hundreds of thousands of mail pieces.
All of this is completed within one-ninth of a second.
Letter carrier Donald Pike sorts Meanwhile, in Peoria’s Remote Encoding Center, one of about 42 postal workers who-specialize in Springfield area mail glances at a screen showing the image of the letter hundreds of miles away and – at the rate of one address every 4 1/2 seconds, or nearly two keystrokes per second – types its nine-digit zip code. In this case, it’s 01301 plus four other digits pinpointing which mail route George Street is on.
It takes Peoria — one of 55 such remote centers around the country, wife mow than 500 employees Recorder photo/Paul Franz his route in the Greenfield post office before making his rounds dealing with Chicago, Detroit, Indiana and soon Worcester area addresses — roughly 30 minutes to get to the George Street letter. About 30 percent of Springfield’s letter mail have addresses sent to the remote center, said Therrien – although that also increases as handwritten holiday cards become more prominent.
The first of the month is “always crazy,” says Therrien, dressed in a white shirt and tie as he supervises the flow of envelopes, and Mondays tend to be more hectic than other days.
This year’s mail peak is due on Dec. 15, with 5 million letters expected to pass by the Peoria typists. For metered mail, which doesn’t require canceling, the Springfield center also has three optical character readers, which reads up to five lines of the address, then automatically prints bar codes on letters at 35,000 mail pieces an hour, or sends images from unreadable addresses to the Peoria center
Once bar codes are printed on the envelopes, a reader-sorter breaks the destination it can — in some cases even putting it in the “walk sequence” the letter carrier uses to deliver their mail.
The Westinghouse Electrocom Bar Code sorter, which will get the George Street letter at about 2 a.m in a stack of hundreds of pieces of mail, operates like a giant computer performing card tricks before your eyes, faster than anyone’s eyes could see. At nine letters a second, it not only reads their orange identification code and uses it to match each piece with the bar code prepared in Peoria, but uses that bar code to sort the mail in one of dozens of slots — one for each western Massachusetts post office.
Instantly, the George Street letter will travel though the sorter, as long as two bumper-to-bumper stretch limos, and lands in Tray 53 — Greenfield 01301. It will then be placed in a yet-more-elaborate sorter, programmed with each of Greenfield’s delivery routes, to be placed in the proper sequence for each letter carrier to walk his or her route.
But now it’s only 8:10 p.m., and Therrien examines a computer screen telling him that already 61,000 addresses have been processed in Peoria and are awaiting being reunited with the trays of letters sitting in one of several bullpens. It’s waiting for workers to return from their dinner break, and mail from other GMFs, like Hartford, Worcester and Boston, to ship in their Springfield area mail later in the night “It looks like a lot of mail,” he says, surveying dozens of thousands of letters in heaps, on racks, at various points of the automation process. “We’ll have every piece go through by 10:30,” he adds confidently.
It’s not false confidence, either.
Even though it sometimes seems the mail plays a “hurry up and wait game,” stopping for hours before its next techno-zip, the Springfield facility recently won a 95 percent rating in an official audit of getting the mail through on time.
Yes, the mail is in check.
Here, that means that any mail within Massachusetts or northern Connecticut by S p.m. will reach its destination in the same area the following day.
By 5 a.m., the first sorted mail is on a Two Brothers truck, headed through the darkness along 1-291 and 1-91 for Greenfield.
Back in Franklin County
It’s shortly after 4 a.m. when the contract driver known as Tom arrives at the Franklin Street loading dock with his 44-foot tractor load of mail. The driver lets himself in and leaves the two or three carts Of mail trays in the delivery area, where supervisor Jon C. Bassett and the^handful of “first crew” workers will find it when they arrive beginning at around 4:30.
Tom is back at 6:45, with two or three more carts loaded with mail, including the George Street letter
He also leaves bundles for Northfield and Bernardston, which another contractor will retrieve in a matter of minutes and forward to those post offices.
At 8 a.m., a U.S. Postal Service box van arrives. It usually carries the walk-sequence mail, but because that’s arrived earlier today, there’s only one tray of stragglers that Springfield wants to assure gets delivered today.
Even by 5 a.m., with three workers breaking down the mail into the 14 “city” and two rural routes — primarily north and south of the Mohawk Trail — it’s beginning to crowd the building, built between 1915 and 1939.
Seventeen rows of fluorescent lights on the high ceilings bathe the large rectangular workroom — with black tile floor, pale blue upper walls and wooden paneling along the bottoms. In the center are 18 large wheeled hampers holding parcels for each of the routes, along with separate tubs and sacks marked “high school,” “middle school,” “town hall,” and “Weldon.”
Around the rest of the area are banks of mail slots for each of the 16 routes, where half a dozen carriers are pigeon-holing magazines, letters and other pieces into metal letter cases and flat cases.
It’s quiet as the work area fills up.
The voice of singer John Prine is the only music heard when it comes on suddenly at 6:15. For the most part, employees who want to work to music wear headphones here
The Greenfield post office, which delivers to 10,000 addresses in town, normally handles a quarter-million letters and “flats” a week, said Postmaster Mark Edstrom, in addition to 700 parcels.
“At Christmas,” he said, “that could double.” The workload at the post office started picking up in September, said Edstrom, with delivery of L.L. Bean, Victoria’s Secret and other holiday catalogs. Some of these catalogs, which are sent bulk rate, await delivery in bundles on the floor.
This, and the priority mail that’s been increasing as people shop increasingly by phone and by Internet, is what pays the real freight for the postal service the way that advertising makes periodicals affordable. For that reason, one postal employee says, “junk mail” is a four-letter word.
What’s ahead for the Postal Service technology, said Edstrom, is a greater ability to track mail
But if postal automation excels at gee-whiz speed, Greenfield’s 45- member crew is big on personalized attention.
“If a person’s moved, we know it,” said Edstrom. “Their mail won’t get sent back to Springfield; we’ll try to get it delivered to them today. Even if it’s misaddressed, we’ll get them their mail.”
Hitting the streets
Donald Pike, a 53-year-old carrier with an elfin beard and a University of Massachusetts degree in Russian language and literature, is at work at 7 a.m. at his bank of letter boxes for “Trip 4,” which includes Sanderson Street, Madison Circle, part of lower High Street… and George Street.
Peering through plastic-rimmed half glasses, the bearded “Piker,” as he’s called, zips letters into the appropriate pigeonholes with precision and speed that make you wonder what the fuss about automation is all about.
Pike has had this route for five of the 12 years he’s worked in Greenfield, after working his way up from filling in for other carriers on their days off.
With about 462 addresses on his 4 1/2-mile route, he wears 3-ounce Rocky high-top walkers to help him as he carries about 2,500 letters and flats, along with parcels.
Most he leaves in his Grumman Long Life Vehicle, which he parks in convenient spots, such as the corner of Orchard and George.
Pike, who decided to become a postal worker after suffering the failure of a diaper service he started up briefly with his wife, says he enjoys doing the Freeman Drive – Orchard Drive – George Street section of his route after lunch each day because it’s a peaceful place to wind up.
(If the George Street letter had been addressed to an earlier stop on his route, it would be delivered at about 9 a.m., instead of in the early afternoon.)
But the crush of holiday mail comes at the worst possible time for letter carriers: daylight is scarce and the weather worsens. Mail deliveries from other regions, or even air shipments, may be slowed because of poor weather, and letter carriers have to contend with ice and snow as well as the perennial threat of unfriendly dogs.
“This time of year, we’re battling the setting of the sun,” said Pike, who was out with a broken ankle for two months last year after slipping in the snow on his route. He’s also had his fingers bitten by a dog. This is the season when a customer, seeing him arrive at 4:30 p.m. with the mail, is apt to accuse of him running late, because it’s already starting to get dark.
“That’s the worst part of winter,” he says.
But the pay and benefits are good, says Pike — especially the fringe benefit of exercise, which is enjoyable except on rainy days.
“It becomes so automatic sometimes that you can get into a trance,” Pike says of the methodical delivery routine. “You come out of it, and you wonder, ‘Did I do everything right?’”
In fact, Pike says as he plunks the letter from Shelburne Falls into the metal box next to the appropriate George Street front door, it’s the quiet contemplation as you walk the route that you learn to appreciate most.
“That’s all there is,” he says: “you and the walking.”
— RICHIE DAVIS