Anderson celebrates 50 years of home, store mail delivery

GOLDEN BOYS:
In 1959, then-Postmaster Dick Wallace, left, and carriers Bud Chase, Loren Titsell, Oliver Ledoux, Leroy Daily and Regional Inspector Walter Helekson.

The year was 1959. Alaska had just been admitted as the nation's 49th state and Hawaii would soon follow when Anderson residents first learned that home mail delivery service would begin by early March of that same year.

Elsewhere, people were still mourning the deaths of entertainers Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, victims of a chartered plane crash the month before. Here however, Anderson Bowl held its grand opening by touting 12 lanes with automatic pin setting equipment.

Toymaker Mattel, Inc., introduced the Barbie doll the same week that mail delivery started in Anderson. But in Cuba, Fidel Castro's rebel troops were closing in on Havana after deposing that country's leader, Fulgencio Batista. And in Anaheim, the Walt Disney Company was preparing later that year to debut "Sleeping Beauty" in movie theaters around the country.

Anderson's 4,500 residents, meanwhile, were busy filling out change of address forms to let all of their correspondents know that their mail should no longer be sent to a post office box, but rather a specific street address. Mail boxes of a regulation size and type also had to be installed.

To supply the community's needs, McMillan's Building Supply in Anderson purchased a quarter-page ad in the local newspaper offering "400 mailboxes in stock in 35 different models and types."

Address numbers of a regulation size and color also had to be posted on all homes and businesses while the sometimes daily habit of heading down to the U.S. Post Office to pick up mail was soon to become a distant memory.

"Until we got delivery, everyone had a post office box that they would check several times a week or sometimes even once a day," retired postal carrier LeRoy Daily, 83, remembers.

"I was born in Anderson, so I was acquainted with folks even before I ever took a job there," Daily added, noting that most people in town seemed to know each other by sight, if not always by name.

Clerks working regularly at the post office's service window had their favorite customers, many of them neighboring businessmen who also appreciated the frequent foot traffic going by their shops.

"The lines for service used to get pretty long some days," recalls retired U.S. Postmaster Dick Wallace, who was filling in as interim postmaster when mail delivery was first proposed in Anderson.

Those changes were slow to catch on, however, as many city residents had more important things on their mind.

Incorporated as a city on Jan. 16, 1956, Anderson's still-fledgling city government was reeling from the successful recall of three of its founding city council members - Alvin Treat, Earl Gossett and Marshall Squier - who had voted to fire Police Chief Victor Armitage on what later were found to be trumped-up charges. The "Big Three" were ousted and Armitage re-instated with back pay after a special public election.

Meanwhile, Anderson merchants, hurt by the closure since November 1958 of the North Street bridge due to a county widening and resurfacing project of the bridge, were urging the local Chamber of Commerce to promote and support a program to keep the city's sales dollars within city limits. Nearly 200 families living on the north side of the Sacramento River took their business elsewhere rather than make a 41-mile detour down a narrow and dangerous logging trail that later became Deschutes Road.

Work on a new steel grandstand to replace an aging wooden structure at the Shasta District Fair grounds was set to begin in April of that year and ground-clearing work had just started at the former Vets Housing Project to create Anderson's first city park, now known as Veterans Park.

A three-bedroom home rented for $65 per month, grain-fed beef sold for .59 cents per pound, oak wood fetched $8 a tier and a used Model D John Deere tractor and bottom plow was advertised for $350.

As the March 7, 1959, deadline for home delivery approached in Anderson, paperwork consumed much of each work day for Wallace, who by then was waiting anxiously to hear whether his nomination to permanently fill the position - as proposed by then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower - had, in fact, been approved by Congress.

Back then, the U.S. Postal Service was still a branch of government and had not yet been granted the quasi-independent status it has had since 1971.

However, by March 19, 1959, the Anderson Valley News reported in a front-page article that "a smooth transition to home delivery" had been made "although some businesses and homeowners had not yet informed their correspondents" of their new addresses.

"Our carriers have been instructed not to leave mail unless regulation mail boxes have been installed" and the requisite address numbers posted clearly on each building or entry to which mail was addressed, Wallace told the newspaper's editor, Joy Richardson.

Many changes have taken place since then, not the least of which is the growth in volume of mail handled and the automatic sorting of most mail, current Anderson Postmaster Sherry Lelevich said.

"Last week, we reported processing more than 10,000 pieces of mail, some 6,000 in flats (envelopes), 2,000 packages and the rest in bulk," Lelevich said.

"Automation is key," she noted. "The carriers receive a lot of their route mail already sorted by address."

In 1959, Anderson started mail delivery service to 3,500 addresses within city limits with just eight employees, four full-time and two part-time employees. Two rural carriers handled mail deliveries outside Anderson's city limits to another 3,200 addresses, the Valley News reported in March 1959.

"We had one mounted route, but the other three city routes were all walking routes that we did two times each day," remembers Loren Titsell, now a resident of Trinity Center. "We eventually got to know the people on our routes and they always gave us a hard time if we were even a few minutes late," recalled Titsell, who in 1973 replaced Wallace as Anderson's postmaster.

Today, the Anderson Post Office boasts 31 employees including Lelevich; nine city carriers and six clerks, while the rural deliveries require eight regular route drivers and seven substitutes to cover the assigned territories, Lelevich said.