‘A Love Letter to the Postal Service'

‘A Love Letter to the Postal Service’
A conversation with author and former postal employee Steve Grant

As a special holiday gift, NAPS Director of Legislative & Political Affairs Bob Levi welcomed Stephen Grant, a former Postal Service employee who, about six months ago, released his best-selling book, “Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home.”

The book recounts his personal experiences and reflections working for the Postal Service and the remarkable people with whom he worked and to whom he delivered mail. The book has earned rave reviews from The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine and others.

Levi: Welcome to NAPSChat, Steve.

Grant: Bob, it’s great to be here.

Levi: In its review of “Mailman,” the Southern Review of Books writes that you “Pull back the curtain on the Postal Service, revealing its foibles and idiosyncrasies, alongside its stalwart heart built of devoted service and hard work.” Was that your intention as you began writing the book?

Grant: It was not. And it was not my intention when I began my time as a letter carrier. I took the job at the beginning of the pandemic because no one was hiring but the Postal Service and I needed health care. I remain grateful to the USPS and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association for the health care my family and I enjoyed during my time as a carrier.

As I wrote the book, I really just set out to tell the story of my year as a letter carrier. It turned into a love letter, I think, as I researched more about the Postal Service as I was writing the book — I wanted to keep my facts straight.

I realized it is an incredible institution and has incredible people working for it. My book wound up being a love letter for all the things I got out of being a letter carrier.

Levi: This is a letter to the Postal Service?

Grant: I think so. The Postal Service is an imperfect institution, like anything else. As Churchill was quoted, “It has been said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms …” The post office doesn’t do everything perfectly, but it does something incredible every day, which is deliver mail to every address in the United States.

And it has incredible people working for it. I don’t think I appreciated the difficulty of the job being a letter carrier — the difficulty of all the many jobs inside the many post offices — and how seriously everybody took their work.

I wanted to be sure that came across for folks when they read this book who are less familiar with the Postal Service—how earnest and sincerely their carrier took the security and sanctity of the mail and how they held it as their sacred charge, at the risk of being dramatic, to get their letters and parcels to their home every day.

Levi: As you know, a lot of letter carriers, a lot of postal employees, as well as federal employees, probably purchased your book. Federal policy makers will be reading your book, if they haven’t done so already. What would this group of civil service employees gain from reading it?

Grant: For starters, as a guy who was in the private sector his whole career until I was a letter carrier, there was something special about it — something missing from my other work. When you are part of the government, particularly right down there in the front lines, it was a national emergency, but I was doing a service to the American people.

There is a lot of cynicism out there, but I almost never got that from my customers. They always were glad to see me. It’s a tough job when you are learning how to do it. If I made a mistake, my customers were forgiving; they love the U.S. Postal Service.

If I were speaking to executive management in the USPS …

Levi: I hope they are listening to this!

Grant: I hope they’re listening, too! High up in the organization, you’re looking at org charts, running one of the largest logistical systems in the world, managing labor relations, having to deal with organizational change management, how you are deploying your capital — there are all those challenges. That’s the management consultant in me talking,

But to your customers, this is a beloved service they see as something they love, but also their right as an American. I would start with any decisions you are making with, “Is this improving service to the customer and preserving this endowment that is in Article I of the Constitution for future generations of Americans?” If you use that as your North Star in your decision-making, you will at least make clearer decisions.

Levi: Your book recounts your transition from being a high-end marketing consultant to a simple rural letter carrier and, finally, back to consulting. Now you are on the speaking circuit. How did being a postal employee change you as a person?

Grant: It was a lesson in humility for a year. I’ll be honest and say I had some arrogance coming into the job. Here I am, I have a master’s degree, I’ve consulted with the Fortune 500; surely it can’t be that difficult to deliver the mail.

It’s a common mistake — if you’re good at one thing it’s going to transfer into another. I was awful! I was as bad as any other starting carrier; I was as overwhelmed as they were.

A really wonderful man at the Roanoke PD&C, the recruiter when he was onboarding me, told me, “Don’t get your blinders on. You’re going to be overwhelmed in those first few weeks. Just take your time and follow the mail.” I went back to his advice over and over again that year.

You advance in your career and forget what it’s like to be the new guy. You forget what it’s like not to know everything you are supposed to. I really took that to heart once I left being a carrier to tell myself, alright, the people I’m talking to at the airport or the supermarket are in a front-line position and this might be their first day on the job or they may be having a tough day.

I’ve got to remember they have to be treated with respect and patience because they probably have as tough a job as I had when I was just a rookie carrier. I think that with my co-workers, too.

Levi: We have a new postmaster general, David Steiner. He’s learning a lot about the Postal Service. What should he get out of this book if he were to read it?

Grant: In some ways, I see he has two sets of customers. He has the American people, of course, but then he has his front-line workers. Letter carriers are the soul of the post office. At one point in the book, I talk about that telling postal workers how to stay hydrated when it’s 100 degrees outside is like telling a soldier in World War I to try not to get shelled.

There’s a disconnect, I think, sometimes with the way carriers are treated. I would love to see them get more attention from management. I recognize it’s a collective bargaining role; unions are involved. There are a lot of capital restrictions on how the Postal Service can do business. It isn’t a normal business; it answers to Congress.

But I would love for the PMG to get creative about how to better support carriers in the city and rural craft. How do you make their driving safer? How do you get them better gear for hot weather, cold weather, wet weather, better footwear? How do you get them enough time to eat a decent lunch?

This is all stuff that, with some flexibility, could be built in and worked out with unions and management. It’s easy to get stuck up at 80,000 feet and it’s not like the Postal Service doesn’t have 80,000-foot challenges, as well. But, at the end of the day, it’s those men and women who go out and carry the mail to the front doors of millions of addresses across this country — they have to be taken care of and I would love for them to focus on that.

Levi: Let’s move down from the 80,000-foot level to the 5,000-foot level where many of our listeners are — postal supervisors, postmasters and managers. What should they get out of this book? What was your relationship with them? How did you interact with the postmaster, the front-line supervisor — folks like that?

Grant: When I first started at the Blacksburg, VA, MPO, I had a super postmaster; she was great! She is the one who helped me navigate the maze of getting into an open position in Blacksburg versus Cave Spring up the road. If she hadn’t done that and I would have had to drive another 50 minutes each way, every day to work, I don’t know if I would have made it.

But she went out of her way to help me; what an example of a great postmaster! She was helping her customers and helping other carriers in her office by getting a position filled and she helped me.

I had some crummy postmasters, too, who were not employee-support focused. If you are a good postmaster, you know it. You back your carriers up, you back your clerks up and help them get the job done. And keep doing it because you are doing the Lord’s work.

I had some supervisors who were fantastic! They looked after me, even when we were getting smashed by Amazon. They made sure I had time to cool off and get a bite to eat between parcel runs.

The front-line supervisors have tough jobs. There’s animosity sometimes between carriers and management, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I felt pretty blessed to have a harmonious labor-management relationship in that office.

I got sent to another office; I won’t name names. I got TDYed there during peak season and that person was not friendly and it made it really tough. I think the men and women who know they are out there trying to get the mail delivered, but are taking care of their carriers — I know they know who they are. Being treated with respect goes a really long way.

Levi: Let’s talk about other folks you dealt with delivering mail — your customers. You had some interesting personalities you talk about in your book. Can you share one or two of those memories most meaningful to you?

Grant: I’ll give you good ones and a tough one. I had a couple of great older folks on my route who helped me and I had an opportunity to help them. There was an older woman in a remote area. I carried chicken feed down to her chicken coops. She gave me a bag of eggs to take home to my family.

“God bless you, young man,” she said. I was 50 at the time and thought I must be doing something okay! Getting that kind of praise and generosity from a customer made me feel 10-feet tall.

There’s a little town outside Blacksburg called McCoy. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that many people with the last name McCoy live in that town. I couldn’t find which McCoy to whom I was supposed to deliver a parcel. It’s all dirt roads. There was an old man tending his vegetable garden and I asked him for some direction.

I told him I thought the delivery was some kind of body-building stuff. He pointed and said, “Go past that oak tree and there will be a blue trailer and that’s where you are going.” Then he told me to wait while he ran off and filled a grocery bag with tomatoes. “Bring those to your family,” he exclaimed.

One of the things I was shocked by, cynical marketing guy I was going into this, was people are really nice; they will help you if you ask for it. People will take your help if you offer it. The overwhelming majority are kind, generous people looking out for the folks around them.

My other story is I had a really difficult encounter with a customer who wanted to blame me for her parcel being late and, seemingly, the many problems of the world while she was at it. It really bothered me.

Most of the time that stuff is like water off a duck’s back, but, on that given day, her hostility really got to me. For managers, I hope you understand that it’s not every day, but, sometimes, there is a lot of hate that gets thrown at your carriers. It’s not that often, but it can be shocking when it does happen.

It’s an additional burden the carrier has to bear. You are representing not only the Postal Service, but the U.S. government and you have to meet people with kindness and a cool character, but it still hurts. When someone calls you stupid or irresponsible, it hurts and that’s something your carriers put up with.

Levi: Let me ask about your experience with postal vehicles. The notorious long-life vehicle — LLV. Can you talk about it?

Grant: Yeah, the death trap! I didn’t drive the LLV very much; I drove an FF. There were a lot of great things about it. You had a big sliding door with the ready tray on the left you could pass back through the bulkhead into the cargo area and it was very nimble.

But, you also were struck by the fact that thing was on the road when I was in high school and I am not a young man. If you drive to any post office around the country, for the most part, what you see in the parking lot are LLVs and FFVs.

They don’t have airbags, crumple zones or air-conditioning. The heaters don’t work sometimes. They don’t have all-wheel drive or modern brakes. They don’t have any sensors or cameras. They don’t have anything. They are an aluminum cracker box on a Chevy S-10 chassis.

It’s proof that the Postal Service can’t deploy and raise capital the way a company can. UPS is not driving the same trucks it drove 20 years ago; Amazon is out there with electric trucks. But the Postal Service is driving stuff it had 30 years ago.

I know the next-generation vehicles are coming out and I hear they are great. But you are putting men and women in what I consider to be unsafe vehicles and you are doing it every day. And the fact that rural carriers drive civilian vehicles from the right-hand seat, reaching across the controls — I don’t understand to this day how that is legal.

It’s my one real ding against the Postal Service. For all the training, you have excellent training, but, at the end of the day, you are putting somebody in a vehicle that’s not fit for service. I’m glad to see it’s starting to change.

Levi: Steve, for most people, they think you stick a stamp on an envelope, put it in the mailbox and it miraculously appears at its destination. In a CBS News interview you had with Major Garrett, he compared the process of delivering and processing mail to food preparation. Isn’t it important for Americans to understand how mail is processed?

Grant: I think it’s very important. I hated casing mail. During an earlier draft of the book, my editor said, “I wish you would tell me more about how you actually get ready to go out on the road every morning.”

I said okay and wrote the chapter about casing mail. I have had so many people tell me, “That was my favorite chapter! I’ve always wondered how that happens.” A lot of people were surprised that not everything was automated.

My brother John even said, “Yeah, you pick up your truck in the morning and you get out on the road.” I told him, “There’s no picking up the truck! You have to organize everything.”

I have described it as you put a library of random books in order every morning and, over the course of your route, you take it apart again. It’s one of the most arcane skills a carrier does. When a carrier has to sub for someone else’s route, they will tell you that casing mail when you don’t know the route is almost impossible.

Levi: Funny thing is my dad, who was a clerk years ago, would do something called scheming, which was before DPS where you actually had to know the route order almost by heart and where different addresses were. You didn’t have the electronic process of scanning the mail and having it presorted for you. The carriers had to do it themselves or have the clerk do it for them.

Grant: And that is such a feat of memory! I became surprised over time that on the routes I was familiar with, I would put the parcels in the vehicle in route order and remember, oh right, 131 Smith has two parcels today. Over time, you would internalize the route. Without that carrier knowledge, I don’t think the Postal Service would work; it’s that human element.

A reader sent a letter to Blacksburg: To Steve Grant, author of Mailman, Blacksburg, VA. It got delivered to me!

Levi: As you are touring the country, promoting your book, do you want to share any comments from readers?

Grant: Sure. You touched on it in one of your questions — I had no idea what all went into delivering the mail and all the things carriers have to do. What an adventure it is for the mail to get delivered every day. I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, “My father was a letter carrier,” “My grandfather was a letter carrier,” “My aunt is a letter carrier” or “My uncle is a letter carrier.”

In some ways, it’s the family business of the country. It’s one of those things that, along with military service, ties us all together because so many people have worked for the Postal Service.

I encountered that as I delivered around Blacksburg. I got coffee and was given snacks. Customers shared with me those they knew in their life who had been a letter carrier.

But, as I go around the country and have so many people share their stories, “When I was a kid, my postman said hello to me every day and I looked forward to seeing him,” I realize what a part of the fabric of life letter carriers are in this country. They are a tremendous, invisible, everyday treasure we all have.

I hope folks appreciate that; I knew that when I wrote the book. But I’ve been surprised I’ve heard so much of that as I’ve gone around the country.

Levi: Let me mention a phrase and get your reaction to it: “postal patriotism.”

Grant: I’ll give you two thoughts. The first is I didn’t consider myself an unpatriotic person, but being a letter carrier made me a more patriotic person. I was very proud to represent the United States Postal Service and be part of this brotherhood that stretched all the way back to Ben Franklin and the hundreds of years between now and the founding of the country.

I would tell people who are thinking about the Postal Service that they could feel a sense of pride about our Postal Service. I lived in the U.K. and one of my closest friends lives there now. He has told me what a mess privatization has made of the Royal Mail.

I was talking to a guy at the American Enterprise Institute who reviewed my book …

Levi: Kevin Kosar?

Grant: Yes! A wonderful guy. He had written a glowing article in defense of modernization and the role the Postal Service plays. I had written him because he wrote me a very nice review. I said that, being with the American Enterprise Institute, I assumed he would be gung-ho for privatization because the organization is so free-market.

He responded, “There is nothing in the free market that can take on a country the size of the United States. The puny postal services of Europe will not scale to a nation the size of America.” I loved that framing.

And he’s right. I left my eyeglasses on a dive boat in Hawaii. They sent them back to me Priority Mail in just a couple days for about $15. I thought, that’s nothing these days — from Hawaii — from the middle of the Pacific Ocean all the way to Virginia.

The package was tracked every step of the way and protected by federal law enforcement from one end to the other. That’s remarkable. So to go back to the idea of having patriotic feelings about our postal system, it is a miraculous, economic multiplier that has created tremendous wealth, opportunity and creative output and connections in the correspondence of the American people and small businesses and large enterprise.

It has been something that our founders in their foresight built for us; every generation has reinvented it for a growing, evolving country. I hope it will be there for my grandchildren.

Levi: And I think your book will help preserve this wonderful institution. Steve, I want to thank you for joining me today.

Grant: Bob, it was my pleasure.