First published in The Record, Aug. 21, 2020

Save the Post Office! In one Small town, here’s how they did it.

It’s just a little post office, standing off by itself near the railroad tracks, across the four-lane from a farm full of corn and beets. 

But unless you pay attention, you might miss your chance to get inside. 

Ron Petrosky knows this place better than most. He got a post office box here in 1969, and he’s kept it ever since: No. 2124. He paid attention, and he learned. Don’t come when the office opens at 9 a.m. You’ll get stuck in a line that stretches into the parking lot. Don’t come after 10 a.m., because that’s when nearby shop owners pick up their morning mail. Don’t come at 3:30 p.m., when the factory and farm laborers come after work. And after 4 p.m.? Forget it. That’s when all the eBay sellers arrive, each looking to mail armloads of boxes.

So on Thursday morning, Petrosky timed his entrance with precision. He walked into the little post office at 9:30. No other customers were inside, giving Petrosky time to do what he likes best: gab. 

“So, Kristi’s out sick?” Petrosky, who is 68 and retired, said to the mail clerk.

Lately, the United States Postal Service has come under attack from members of the Trump administration. Petrosky likes Trump. But he loves his little post office. When it was threatened, Petrosky was first in line to save it. 

Threats big and small

This morning, Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general and former mega-donor to President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, will testify at an emergency hearing in Congress about changes he proposed to radically shrink the United States Postal Service weeks before a presidential election in which more people may vote by mail in this country than ever before.

DeJoy abandoned many of his planned cuts, including limits on employee overtime and removing hundreds of mail sorting machines, after elected leaders of both parties criticized the plan for potentially derailing the 2020 election. DeJoy already has scrapped sorting machines at several locations, however, and replaced key Postal Service leaders with others viewed to be more loyal to Trump. 

These changes may have contributed to delayed delivery of mail-in ballots in Connecticut and Minnesota, which have joined a lawsuit with 11 other states that claim DeJoy’s actions illegally disenfranchised voters. DeJoy has not yet commented on whether his latest decision includes plans to reverse actions the agency has already taken. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said Tuesday that he would also sue the Trump administration. 

Some have characterized DeJoy’s decisions as part of a unified strategy by Trump and his allies to delay and delegitimize an election in which Trump is losing badly in the polls. Others view it rather as another example of disorganized bungling by an administration that regularly fails to grasp the minutiae of governing. 

As the bickering heats up today on Capitol Hill, the little post office on the south side of Vineland shows what’s at stake. In a state known for its hundreds of tiny suburbs, Vineland is a city of 60,000 people across 69 square miles, making it New Jersey’s largest municipality by land area. Yet this sprawling municipality has just two post offices: one on Landis Avenue in the center of town, where parking is limited and lines are usually long; and the one on Southeast Boulevard, surrounded by farms, railroad tracks and plenty of parking.  

People with long histories in town know which to choose. On Thursday morning, the downtown location had 20 people in line, and just one clerk. Out on the edge of town, business at the little post office was brisk, but the line stayed short.

“I’ve been coming here more than half my life,” said Robert DeMarchi Jr., 51, a retired Vineland police officer. “Here, you get the small-town feeling. You know everybody, and it’s quicker.”

The place is cramped. To reach the clerk, customers must navigate a narrow hallway lined with metal post office boxes and a spinning rack of Hallmark birthday cards. It’s also popular, generating at least $350,000 in profit from walk-in customers each year, said Frank Bollinger, business agent for American Postal Workers Union Local 0526, whose job affords him access to the branch’s finances.

Yet this post office consistently finds itself at the center of wayward Postal Service plans. Repeatedly over the decades, the federal agency has proposed cuts, which variously included replacing it with a kiosk at a nearby mall or simply closing the branch entirely.

“I forget how many times our local newspaper said the place was targeted for shutdowns or downsizing,” Mohan said. 

The latest attempt happened last month. As Petrosky stood inside, watching, a branch employee taped a flyer to the front door informing customers that beginning in August, the branch would only open on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.  “I left, and called my daughter,” he said “And I told her, ‘You gotta start a petition.’ ”

Mohan got right to the point. Her petition, posted on Change.org, read in part: “This post office is always packed with people, so cutting of hours makes NO sense!”

After the petition got 867 signatures, the Postal Service, which declined to comment for this column, backed down. The branch will remain open during normal business hours. Even the organizers of the protest were surprised by the sudden reversal.  

“I really didn’t expect it to take off like it did,” said Mohan, who works as a special education teacher at a private school. “I’m not a political person. I’m just a nobody here in town. I just wanted to support our little local post office.”

A basic constitutional right

On Thursday morning the crowd of customers at the little post office grew and ebbed, but never stopped. Mildred Davis pays her gas and cable bills in cash, in person, dropping off the bills and dimes at the companies’ offices in Vineland. But the important stuff, including her mortgage, letters to her daughter in Alabama and her voting ballot, all gets mailed here.

“If they were only open four hours a day, I don’t know what I’d do,” said Davis, who arrived wearing dark-blue scrubs from her job, working overnight as a nurse at a nursing home. “I’ve been up all night. I need to get home. I can’t be here standing in line.”

DeMarchi arrived with 19 packages full of knickknacks wrapped in brown paper, all of which he sold on eBay. Loading them all into the post office included two trips, and one manila envelope dropped on the sidewalk. On Monday he mailed 29 packages.

“When you go downtown, you have to park pretty far from the door,” said DeMarchi, who signed the petition online the day it was posted. “Here I can just park and walk right in. I’m glad we were able to save it.”  

Across the four-lane highway, Anthony Malench lifted baskets of corn from the bed of his pickup onto the table of his family’s farm stand. He’s the fourth generation to farm these 55 acres. He spent much of Thursday harvesting beets. He doesn’t have a box at the little post office, doesn’t spend much time chatting with people in line. But he knows the place is important.  

“My grandma is 87, and she walks over there every day,” said Malench, 32. “Plus, the post office is a basic constitutional right. It’s not even an amendment. It’s right there in the first article.”

He’s right, of course. It’s right there in Article 1, Clause 8, Section 7: “The Congress shall have the Power To ... establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Never in our lifetimes has our national debate been so riddled with conspiracy theories and cynicism. But when DeJoy ordered cuts that could have hobbled the Postal Service and an all-important election, it doesn’t really matter what his intentions were. Citizens were there, protesting outside his mansions in North Carolina and Washington, D.C. When this Postal Service threatened to downsize a small post office in a small New Jersey city, citizens were there, too. Both times, people defended the constitutional foundations of our country, and won. 

We can do it again.