Are you R eady for another Hot Summer?

By Terrence Lee Super, Fourth Vice President

Are you all ready for another summer as a Letter Carrier? Your customers definitely love to see you all out there delivering their mail despite those 90 degrees plus days. If they offer you water please take it, your customers want to help in any way they can to get you through those long hot exhausting summer months. It is important that all of you hydrate BEFORE you go out to the street.

As you all know, this is an extremely physical job, and it takes a lot out of you. If you don’t hydrate and eat healthy during these summer months you can be a victim of heat exhaustion. Your health and safety are important to us all and we want you to be able to make it through the summer with no issues.

Management is not contractually obligated to purchase water for you but some of the offices that I represent actually do purchase water. I was able to help them appreciate that if they take care of the carriers by purchasing water for them, they would appreciate it and the morale would be a lot better. Carriers should feel like they are appreciated and that is not shown enough by management. When people feel appreciated, they tend to want to do more for you, but management has yet to understand that. Some do, but most don’t.

If you are out in the sun and you need a break, do that. There is no limit to how many breaks you can take in the extreme heat. Even if you have to go inside of an airconditioned building to bring your body’s core temperature down, you can definitely do that. If management gives you a hard time with that, please let us know. It is also important that if you do not feel good, please contact your supervisor and let them know. It is their duty to check on you to make sure you are not suffering from heat exhaustion.

Just a couple of other things that we want to bring to your attention is that the NALC is under contract negotiations and I for one am very optimistic about the possible outcome. The Postal Service is not going anywhere so we need to set the Postal Service and our carriers up for success by properly staffing the offices with more carriers to help take some of the burden off of the ones who don’t want all of the overtime, and with higher pay. If we can do that, more people will want to work for the Postal Service again and actually stay.

This is a great company and we do well to take care of it. Like I always say, it’s not the best job in the world but it has kept a roof over our heads and clothing on our back. Some have been able to even send their kids to college. The only thing we want fixed is how management treats you hardworking letter carriers. I have zero tolerance for that. So again, brother and sisters be safe out there and hope to see you more at our Branch Meetings!

Exploring the Oldest Post Offices in the United States

By Angelo Young, 24/7 Wall Street

Postal service in the United States is older than the country itself. The idea of an organized way to move mail originated in 1774 as a method to get around the nosy colonial inspectors of the British-run postal service during the struggle for American independence

In 1775, multi potentialite Founding Father Benjamin Franklin became the first postmaster general, and his eponymous post office on Philadelphia’s Market Street, part of Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, still offers limited service as a tourist novelty: Postcards sent from there are marked with Postmaster Benjamin Franklin’s cancellation stamp.

One of the country’s oldest full-service post offices that still operates in its original building is located on Main Street in Hinsdale, in southeastern New Hampshire, dating back to 1816. But it’s not the oldest post office in New Hampshire –that one is located in the port city of Portsmouth

Very few of the country’s oldest post offices still occupy their original premises, even though some of those buildings still stand. For example, Washington D.C.’s Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue – an example of 19thcentury Romanesque Revival architecture that’s on the National Register of Historic Places – operated as a post office only until 1914. In 2016, it was transformed into the Trump International Hotel – though a few months ago, the Trump Organization bowed out and it’s now a Waldorf Astoria.

The oldest U.S. post offices can be put into two historical categories: first, the period during and shortly after the country’s independence up to 1804, and second, the westward expansionary period of the 19th century, mostly between 1820 and 1867.

24/7 Wall St. used the Postmaster Finder database produced by the USPS to find each state’s first U.S. Post Office within present-day boundaries of the 50 states. The appointment date of the first Postmaster is generally considered to be the establishment date of an office. Where Post Offices originally operated under the authority of another nation in Hawaii, Vermont, and the original 13 states the establishment date represents when the U.S. assumed control of the postal system.

The oldest surviving post offices, dating back as far as 1775, are located in the original 13 British colonies, which later became 14 states and the District of Columbia. With the exception of locations in Louisiana and Missouri, are all located east of the Mississippi River. The newest of the second group of post offices is located way out west, in Hawaii. It was established in 1900.