USPS: Set up to fail

I began this blog after publishing, Postal Service, a novel, thinking it would be a good way to promote it but have followed up with very few stories about the Post Office. But they have been in the news a lot lately so I thought I might add to the chatter.

My novel centered on the conflict between several—but mainly one— supervisor and myself. It loosely followed the same story that Charles Bukowski had used when he published his first novel, Post Office in 1971.

The situation we both described were ones common to a lot of businesses—in fact most businesses. The problem the Postal Service is facing today is very unique in that they are practically being forced to go bankrupt by the Congress and Board of Governors charged to manage it.

This column appeared in today’s Virginian-Pilot Forum section

USPS: Set up to fail

 

THIS WHOLE Postal Service issue seems to be very much like the weather — everybody complains about it, but no one wants to do anything about it. Fact is, there are only seven people, those members of the Board of Governors, who can do anything about it, and they choose not to.

Abraham Lincoln School - Part Two, The Kid's Summer Talent Show

The escapades of Hank Johnson in Hell on Earth, a love story, begin for the most part with him going off to college because that is where he made most of the mistakes affecting his sentence. Before that, he was a pretty average kid doing pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. Earlier, in Abraham Lincoln Playground – Part One, I wrote about our activities when we weren’t being supervised. In Part Two, I take a look at some of the more structured activities.
The Abraham Lincoln summer school program consisted mostly of craft activities that involved making and painting plaster of Paris plaques.
We did the fruits—apples and pears, the presidents—Washington and Lincoln, and the historic events—the Last Supper. We did these and then we would do them again. And when we weren’t doing those we did ashtrays, which you could never have too many of back in the days when both parents smoked from dawn to dusk without ever giving a moments thought to cancer or the dangers of secondary smoke.

I’m sure we did other activities but none come to mind. What does come to mind is the way each summer’s summer school program ended. It was the great, open-to-all-comers, free for all, Abraham Lincoln Summer School Program Kid’s Talent Show. A kid’s talent show in the 50’s meant you’d be lucky to find a parent in the building.

There were three categories—song, dance and other—and musical accompaniment was probably limited to a piano.

Generally I didn’t enter the talent show, preferring instead to sit in the audience and toss wisecracks at those brave enough to perform, but one year was different.

Connecting the Dots

When I wrote Postal Service I didn’t have a name for my main character until I was pretty far along. I wanted to reference Johnny Cash’s rendition of The Ballad of John Henry since I was a carrier and the Postal Service was banking its future on machines that would replace the clerks and carriers. Once I put that song in I decided to name the mailman Henry Johnson, which quickly became just plain Hank.

Since Hell on Earth, a love story is the story leading up to Postal Service, Hank picked up his second leading role. But I wanted to pay tribute to another singer in this book.

John Prine is a great songwriter and storyteller. Like Hank, he was also in the Army—Hank in Vietnam and John in Germany. Some of Prine’s most famous songs dealt with the Vietnam War and the similarities don’t end there. He also just happens to be an ex-letter carrier who delivered mail in Chicago, which is where Eddie Repulski set the door-to-door vacuum cleaner selling record of 60 machines in one month.

In Hell on Earth I write about the Bob Hope Show and the influx of GI’s coming to Long Binh to watch it. There was a fairly large amphitheater but it was not big enough to accommodate everyone. So many of the men were content to watch the show from the top of a telephone pole “the way John Prine listened to Little Richard sing Tutti Frutti on a beach in Indiana when he was nine years old.”

A novel can be many things but it is almost always a string of individual and often unrelated events that when brought together somehow gives new meaning to them all. Take a little war, an interesting part time job, a lot of other not so interesting jobs, a favorite song, an idea you get riding home from a date one night, a Charles Bukowski poetry reading on Halloween night and before you know it you have a book staring back at you on the computer screen. And that’s not all you have.

Postal Service, a novel

In 1971, Charles Bukowski wrote his first novel, Post Office, which described his ten-year career in the Post Office. His struggles with supervision became a backdrop for the personal story of his drinking, gambling and sordid affairs.

I joined the Postal Service a few year after it was reorganized into a newer, more efficient, more modern organization that could successfully take the company into the 21st century.

As I neared the end of my career I found myself having the same struggles with supervision that Bukowski experienced even though I didn’t come to work drunk and didn’t miss work to play the horses.

In the end, I concluded that the new, enlightened Postal Service wasn't a whole lot different than the old, outmoded Post Office. And, just as Bukowski had done, I decided to write a novel about it.