Originally published Sunday, February 6, 2000

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

 All the dogs in Zip Code 98033 must love Steve Conover, because he's never been bitten or even chased down one of the tree-lined streets on Route 38.

"But I remember when I first started, back in about 1977, and Wendy had washed my brand new uniform and hung it out on the clothes line, we came home and found that a dog had literally shredded the shirt. And we never did find the pants." said this most good-natured fellow.

Calling him a local son with deep Kirkland roots is an understatement. Steve and Wendy -- who started dating after their Lake Washington High graduation cruise -- live with their two sons, Jason, 20, and Josh, 17, just two doors down Second Street from where Steve lived as a boy.

"I can open the window and yell" to get his mother's attention over on First Street, he said. "And my sister (Diane Johnson, a hair stylist who still cuts her brother's hair) lives next door, at 1915 Second St. "And I deliver their mail and my own," he said.

The hundreds of folks he delivers mail to think Steve has had First Class stamped all over him from the days when he delivered their newspapers.

His customers include former Kirkland police Chief Hal Doss and wife, Barney. "We've lived here 30 years, and never have had a mailman as good as Steve," said the former chief. "He goes out of his way to help people. One of our neighbors is an older lady who had hip surgery and can't get around much. Steve takes her mail to her door and rings the bell. You'd hardly find anyone in this town who wouldn't tell you the same sort of thing about Steve."

Steve's late father, Richard, was a police officer and detective under Doss, and Steve said that as a boy, "I always figured I'd go into some kind of public service." He was working at a door factory when his mother told of seeing a notice of Postal Service entrance exams.

That was back in the "old" post office, when Kirkland was only one ZIP code, 98033, and Steve delivered a large route on the south end . . . "down in Houghton," and from Lake Washington to 116th Avenue Northeast and the Bellevue border.

"I think when I started as a 'sub' we earned something like $5 an hour, and the routes were bigger," he said. Base pay for a top-scale letter carrier these days is "about $39,000," according to Kirkland Postmaster John Hahn.

"I make a decent living, but this ain't the job someone takes to get rich," Steve said. He is regularly signed up to accept two hours of overtime most work days. The Tuesday after the Martin Luther King holiday, he worked from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. "because you work till the mail's delivered," he said.

The hours don't always allow him time for his passion: watching his sons play baseball. Most of the family's vacations have involved following the sons' teams wherever they play.

But Steve's life is his dedication to his work, and to his customers. And even with mail volumes up significantly, he worries that "there's been a real drop-off in the numbers of Christmas cards in recent years. It's as though everyone's too busy to send 'real' letters or even cards."

"Maybe 80 percent of your customers got two or three pieces of mail a day back when I started," Steve said. "Now, there are few, if any, First Class personal letters, but as many as 10 to 15 pieces of mail and more parcels. I think all the Internet business has sent a lot of (parcel) business our way."

Which is why a 7 a.m. start in front of the sorting "case," even with machine-sorted mail, can take until 10:30 or noon before Steve and his cohorts load their trucks and begin deliveries.

The back shop at the Kirkland P.O. is a bustling but friendly place, especially in the aisle where Steve spends about half of each working day with his fellow mail carriers -- Suzy and Pat and Gloria and Eileen, as well as Steve and Lupe and Mickey and Scotty and a fellow nicknamed Mr. Green Tea.

"Some post offices have strict rules about no coffee or radios or headsets or personal snapshots on your cases, or even casual talking among yourselves," said Steve, talking as he shifted left-right, left-right in a rhythmic dancing sort of sorting motion. His case top is lined with snapshots of Jason and Josh -- each a budding baseball star -- in a display of fatherly pride.

The potential monotony added to the hard work could wear on your psyche as well as your feet and shoulders and wrists, but the cadre of carriers keeps things light and moving along. If circumstances allow, perhaps someone pulls a post card from the mail he's casing and holds it out for the others to see. "All right, where is this?" Everyone else is supposed to guess what foreign country is depicted, . . . sort of an on-the-job geography, architecture and art history lesson.

Once Steve has loaded his truck, No. 1202730, sometimes with barely enough room to stack the trays of sorted mail and the parcels and the "Resident" advertising booklets that everyone gets, he swings by his Second Street home above Juanita and nukes a quick lunch snack, perhaps sneaking a look at any baseball publications in his own mail before hitting the route again.

"You have to be careful because you know the route by heart and can get complacent," he said, wheeling the vehicle around a pair of garbage cans and coming to a halt about 11/2 inches from a rank of covered mail boxes (virtually all Kirkland mail deliveries are "mounted" -- or by vehicle -- except a couple of office buildings and high-rise condos that are growing like a mushroom ring around Kirkland's downtown).

Joan Fischer is one of his longtime customers who has become a friend. "His favorite cookies are my molasses cookies," she said knowingly. "My husband, Don, and I know all about how his boys are doing in baseball. We've known about them since they were (young) boys and Steve was coaching Little League," she said.

Steve has turned down chances to bid on shorter routes. He's rejected route-alterations to cut down on his deliveries as his route seems to grow. And he's never considered applying for a management position. All because he wants to serve his customers who have also become his friends.

"I'm delivering now to the children and grandchildren of people I used to deliver newspapers to when I was a kid," he said smiling. "And they feel that they can ask me to help them -- they even call me up at home, because they all know where I live, right here in the neighborhood."