Pawnee Rock – 67567

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

The Pawnee Rock Post Office. The building was originally the Farmers and Merchants State Bank.  Over the years, as the plate-glass windows were broken out, those windows were boarded over.

PAWNEE ROCK – 67567

My hometown of Pawnee Rock is on the hit list. One hundred and thirty-four Kansas post offices are facing elimination by the U.S. Postal Service. Due to diminishing revenues, the USPS is evaluating 3,700 post offices nationwide and will decide which ones to close.

Post offices in Admire and Neosho Rapids are in jeopardy as well as others in surrounding counties.

It’s sad to see small towns continue to lose those things that hold the community together. I was lucky to have grown up in a time when Pawnee Rock had a high school (which closed when I was in 8th grade), a grocery store, gas station, lumberyard and even a dress shop.

If the Pawnee Rock post office is shut down, at least I will always have good memories of the place; they have been carefully cocooned in my mind.

When I was young, my mom worked part-time as a clerk in the post office and my dad was the relief rural mail carrier. Eventually, Dad drove the route full-time.

Most mornings, I took it upon myself to walk to the post office, which was a little more than a block away. I often took a well-used shortcut through the Christian Church parking lot, a narrow diagonal line of bare earth which sliced through a yard of crabgrass and goathead stickers.

The shortcut deposited me at the edge of the Wilson Bros. welding shop where Willard Wilson sent sparks and crackles into the air. I’d step over the heavy electrical cords that often crossed the sidewalk while trying to divert my eyes because I had been told that looking at the welding flame could blind a person.

My parents taught me our post office box combination early, so by age five I could get the mail on my own. Eye-level to the brass dial, I turned it with great care to the right, the left, then right again. Twisting the knob, I swung open the tiny metal and glass door.

And there was always mail: a newspaper or magazine, perhaps a letter from my grandmother with a postmark of Fayetteville, Ark. As I grew older, I acquired pen pals, one from church camp and another from a fifth-grade letter writing assignment in which we each picked a small town in another state (Arizona for me) and wrote a letter to the fifth grade there.

As I retrieved our mail, other townspeople came in to buy stamps, mail letters, catch up on the local gossip: whose kid was going to college, who was in the hospital. Customers would lean against the counter and talk with Roger Unruh, the postmaster, or with one of the clerks, either my mom or Joan Smith. Several steps behind the counter, Virgil Smith sorted the rural mail.

There were two “no” signs adhered to the glass door. “No Loitering” and “No Animals (Except seeing-eye dogs).” Animals obeyed the signs as far as I know, but regarding the loitering sign, well, would they have padded the benches on top of the radiators if they hadn’t wanted folks to loiter?

About 200 post office boxes covered one wall of the lobby, another wall had the mail slots and the service windows. The two other walls were plate glass windows through which one could observe activity on the street, at the lumberyard or the grocery store. From here, one could see my dad’s woodworking shop across the intersection, or know who was at the tennis court up the street. It was a good vantage point for people-watching.

On chilly weekends, when the service windows were closed, and my junior high friends and I were tired of being cooped up in our homes, we would sometimes hang out in the lobby.

In the coziness of the heated post office, we talked about boys and friends and school. But, lest you think we were merely loitering, we also fulfilled our civic duty by studying the F.B.I.’s wanted posters, memorizing the photographs of men with angry eyes and scarred faces. If one of those bank robbers ever made the mistake of wandering into our little town, we would find a way to distract them and alert authorities.

Small-town post offices are not just places for sending and gathering mail, but for conversation, for connection; they are a part of each town’s identity. Unfortunately, many post offices on the list will likely close, and an important part of the community will disappear in each of those little towns.

Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh