Tales from the old-timer Don’t Judge a Man by His Mailbox
Our American rural mail delivery service was begun in 1896 and is now about 108 years old. All over the country the familiar mailboxes, tens of millions of them, line the roadsides.
Around here, the mailboxes are seen by their owners as strictly functional, and little attention is paid to them unless they get knocked over by a snowplow or smashed by a young fellow loaded up on beer. Far too often a carload of youths go on a vandalism rampage in the nighttime, and crush them with pipes or heavy clubs. Rarely are they caught, because they operate in darkness and by the time you hear the commotion they have sped off. A bunch of them did get caught in Marinette County, though, after smashing more than 20 mailboxes. They were in court and had to pay restitution. The problem was so bad in Oklahoma, where our daughter lives, that homeowners build square masonry protectors with the actual mailboxes inside them. These would be illegal in Wisconsin, I was told, as they could be lethal for drivers who lose control.
You see some mailboxes around here standing rusty, leaning forward, sideways or backwards, overgrown with brambles, and sadly neglected.
One of the greatest guys who ever lived in our neighborhood out here, a man respected and admired, a man who paid his taxes and his bills, served his country and raised his kids, and was well-informed about deer hunting, both with rifle and bow, had an awful-looking mailbox. It was skeejawed, twisted sideways, sagging, downward, rusty and forlorn. It proves you can’t judge a man by his mailbox.
Around here, just about anything goes. They are one of the few remaining emblems of freedom left, as regulations and zoning prohibitions creep outwards from the cities. Some people put up plastic replicas of house, barns, schoolhouses, country churches, whimsical, home-crafted airplanes, conestoga wagons, and other folk art to entertain passing motorists. Some store-bought, plastic and boxlike, resemble a coffin for a pet squirrel. Some have ramshackle, homemade posts and mountings, with nailed on bracing to prevent total collapse.
A popular and neat store-bought mounting features a 4x4” post with a horizontal 4x4’’ base and a 4x4” diagonal brace.
Old friends of ours once lived in Mequon, a posh Milwaukee suburb, and there was total uniformity of mailboxes there. None were lacking in maintenance and all were painted white at regular intervals. Signs of nonconformance or neglect were dealt with tactfully but firmly by neighbors. No sagging, drooping, off-pointing mailboxes in Mequon! The grass was trimmed and everybody “kept up with the neighbors.”
Years ago our neighbor Marshall Marquardt came back from a visit to the Dakotas with the idea for a long, swinging boom that would pivot away when hit by a blast of snow from the plow.
A relic of the past around here is an occasional old milk can filled with sand for stability and the post stuck into it hopefully at a reasonable vertical angle. Milk cans are obsolete today, so they are a rare sight. Their advantage is that if they are knocked over, they can be righted easily, like a child’s roly-poly.
On my way to work at the Peshtigo Times I sometimes give mental “report cards” on the mailboxes I pass. A neat box that sits at an angle rates a C-minus. A rusty, crooked one gets a D. A neat store bought one with flowers and neat landscaping gets an A plus. Ours is strictly functional and gets a B plus, because the numbers are on crooked.
Whatever the owners put out there, it’s a bit of Americana, and the mailman doesn’t complain except to ask you to put your fire number on the side.
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