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caption, page 7:
Honored
Michael Coderre, center, was honored with a service award for more than 40 years of service with the Postal Service. On the left is Jim Kearns, postmaster of Putnam and on the left is Ken Powchak, postmaster of Willimantic. Coderre was given a surprise retirement party in December. Courtesy photo.
Mail
boxes
full of
'family'
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
PUTNAM --- It was much more than hauling around paper in various forms, day after day, year after year.
For Michael Coderre it was the people he saw each day as a mail carrier in Putnam that made his "job" feel more like family.
Coderre retired officially at the end of November having worked for 38 years with the U.S. Postal Service. He also served four years in the Air Force, giving him 42 years of credit.
"I had a good route. Lots of people stayed in the same house for all those years and I saw the kids grow up and get married. Sometimes those kids would get married and stay around and I was serving more than one generation," he said. "I definitely miss my customers," he added.
As he was finishing his military service he said the postal service had a push on to hire veterans returning from the service. Coderre said he wasn't sure what he wanted to do when he got out of the service, so he took the test and began at a letter sorting machine at the Hartford Post office in 1973. In September of 1974 he transferred to Putnam and had his own postal route for 30 years.
Was he ever bitten by a dog? No. And no wasps nests in mail boxes either. But there was the live rat in the collection box one time. And he's seen dead snakes, expired squirrels and dirty diapers in boxes.
Just part of the job. Although some of the streets on his long-time route may have deteriorated, Coderre said he never had any trouble.
"I feel I was like a member of the family and I always felt I was respected," he said.
In some cases Coderre knew that he was the only contact with the outside world for some of his customers. "There were lots of elderly that I might have been the only (outside) contact for them," he said. "They looked forward to seeing me."
And Coderre knew his "family's" routine. He gets used to the routines of his customers and they got used to his, he said.
He recalls one customer that was usually taking the mail out of the mailbox "before I was off the porch," Coderre said. But one day, the gentleman didn't come out. And when he went to deliver the mail the next day, the mail from the day before was still in the box. "I knocked. I listened at the door. No answer." Coderre called police who discovered that the gentleman had died.
The Post Office changed too, through the years. He remembers at the beginning of his career in Putnam, going out to deliver the mail in a very small Jeep. "When we started the little Jeeps were so loaded you could hardly see out the side windows. Eventually you could deliver enough mail that you could see out the side windows much better. Then they moved to bigger Jeeps and then mail trucks."
Inside the system, Coderre said, there's "much more pressure." As the years went by there was much more automation, more pressure, more production expected.
And yet, Coderre said, out on his route, it was family.