Laundry, chickens and a post office

• Homer’s Post Office strives to retain small-town feeling in Internet world

By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

In summer, tourists often show up at the Homer Post Office smelling heavily of fish slime to mail their laundry home.
“They would rather mail their laundry home and pack their fish on the flight,” recalled Maryann Lyda, who worked 25 years for the Homer Post Office. For most of it, she was the town’s first home-delivery mail carrier.
Then there’s the spring time traffic that comes in loud chirps.
“I always knew when it was springtime, because that’s when baby chicks arrive at the post office,” Lyda said.
It’s all in the name of the U.S. Postal Service. In rural Alaska, that can mean an odd assortment of goods arriving in big boxes, including everything from clothing to camping gear to a winter’s supply of groceries.
And, apparently, chickens, crickets and worms. Once the worms got out of their box, but that’s another story.
Homer’s post office has changed a lot since it was first set up on the Homer Spit in 1903. However, the concept of getting “snail mail” from here to there — even in an Internet-driven world — hasn’t changed so much.
Those wanting proof only need to show up at the post office at any time, on any given day and find the line of folks waiting.
There are a lot of reasons for the continued popularity of the local post office, said Cora Mae Wise and Lyda, who together represent some 56 years in the Homer postal service.
Wise worked for the Homer Post Office from 1969 to 2000. Lyda worked from 1983-2009. When Wise started, the post office had about 800 mail boxes, located in the building now occupied by Don Joses’. By the time the post office moved to a building now housing East Kachemak Campus, there were more than that. By then, the town was large enough to support two mail carriers hand-delivering mail for two hours a day. Lyda was the first one to hold this job.
“The rest of my day was spent at the post office,” Lyda said.
When the post office moved to its new location, the population was able to support hand-delivered mail all over town, plus an additional 4,300 post office boxes.
Even in its growing pains, Homer’s post office has long reflected the town and its eccentric, enduring and endearing traits.
But how much longer post offices will be able to retain such character becomes increasingly difficult as Homeland Security brought stream-lined requirements, and the need to be a profitable “business,” brought in new rules on what employees could and couldn’t do.
“It is frustrating to some people to see the post office change. In the old days we were trained to be of service, to be part of the community,” Wise recalled. “With expansion, we have to give up our small-town practices for a more business-like approach. But it should always be that the customer comes first.”
One custom at the Homer Post Office was to hang notices of recent deaths in the community on the door. According to Wise, maintenance people in the ‘60s posed a solution to the sticky, hard-to-remove tape people used to adhere the notices to the window: they placed plastic sleeves up to hold the notices. This proved a more dignified approach, as notices could be easily removed, and new notices inserted.
The post office will continue to let people post the memorial notices.
Lyda and Wise believe this is a good thing to continue. The public often won’t hear of a friend or acquaintance’s death due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA. That means if you call the hospital to check on the status of a patient, if that person is not related to you, the information would not be available, the retired postal clerks point out.
“This is a gentle way to let the public know there’s been a death,” Wise said. “Otherwise, how will they find out?”
Another practice in effect was to allow people to give cards or letters to postal clerks, even if the sender didn’t know an actual address.
This happened recently in Lyda’s household. Her dad, Michael Gill, was sent a post card from a relative who knew that Lyda used to work at the post office, but didn’t know her address.
He addressed the card, “C/O Maryann Lyda who works/used to work at the Homer Alaska Post Office.”
“It was a common custom for the postal clerk to look up the box number and write it on there,” Wise said.
Wise recalled how, one time, a letter came for a woman who had been deceased for 20 years.
“I knew her,” she said. “When we received the card, I knew which house it needed to be delivered to.”
She delivered it to the son’s mailbox.
This kind of historical memory kept in a postal clerk’s head has proved valuable on numerous occasions, the clerks said. As the town grows bigger, they hope some of these traditions can continue.
Alaska already gets a few perks that other Lower 48 post offices don’t. For example, those crickets, worms and chickens, classified as “live” shipments, aren’t allowed anywhere but here.
A visitor-inspector at the Homer Post Office once remarked how many more trucks and volume of mail such a small town handled here, compared to those similarly sized in the Lower 48, Lyda recalled.
“We have three truck deliveries a day during Christmas,” she said. “People here use the post more. They depend on it for shopping needs; they depend on it when they move from one place to another.”
A history of being helpful with one another’s mail is also a good Alaska tradition: It used to be that whole mail sacks were dumped on beaches like those at English Bay, Red Mountain and Halibut Cove. Designated neighbors came to sort and help each other get their mail.
Genny Lyda, now a mother herself and Maryann’s daughter, recalls one time as a little girl in Halibut Cove, she was sitting in the sink getting a bath when the mail arrived on the beach.
“Everyone went off and left me so they could get the mail before the tide came in and washed it away. But I wasn’t worried because I knew they would be back soon.”

Contact the writer
Posted by Newsroom on Jan 27th, 2010 and filed under More News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Subscribe via RSS

Subscribe via email