Whatever the qualifications may be for the position of Postmaster, I'm sure they are higher today that they used to be. The present Postmaster of Westlake Village drives a BMW and can only be seen by appointment. We have twelve mail carriers and six mail trucks. An eighteen-wheeler, jammed with junk mail, backs into the truck dock every morning at seven. On the side of our very own water tower, we display our very own zip code number. We are, in short, a first class neighborhood with a first class post office.
This does not mean that our mail service has improved since the old days. On the contrary! The only noticeable improvement is that our mail is delivered to our door. When the first Westlake Villagers straggled into town at the close of the war, mail sat in the post office until somebody walked down and got it. The post office was little more than a steel-barred window at the back of Ernie's Hardware Store presided over by our Postmistress, Helen Grogan.
Helen was Postmistress through the war years. She and her husband, Andy, handled the entire postal burden in that critical cross-over period between the hayseed years of Toad Hollow and its transformation to a structured community of strangers. Once a day a brown van would dump a canvas bag of mail at the front door of Ernie's Hardware Store and pick up a smaller one that was waiting. Helen and Andy took their sweet time sorting the mail and stuffing it in the worn wooden slots set in the wall behind the barred window. To the accompaniment of grunts and body language that only they understood, the sorting process would grind on until noontime. In their closeness, Helen and Andy had developed a communication of their own; a series of growls, mumbles and nudges were all Helen needed to tell Andy what to do and when to do it.
It was not critical to get mail every day. Once a week was enough for most of us, and when a Westlake Villager went to get his mail, he would grudgingly pick up the mail of his neighbors as well. Helen would insist on it, and it was not unusual to come home with an armload of mail for your neighbors and none of your own. Helen would shout at you from behind her barred window while you were browsing through plumbing supplies in Ernie's Hardware Store. With her head cocked to the side, she would call . . . "Hey you! -- Appledore Drive, pick it up! You got mail here!"
"Appledore Drive" and 'you' were one and the same to her. She would coerce you into accepting mail for 28 through 47, even though you lived at 36, and you'd spend the better part of a Saturday afternoon delivering letters and postcards to your neighbors. If you had the nerve to ignore her, she would shout at you and fling your mail, and that of your neighbors, at your feet. Fortunately, in the early fifties, fourth class mail had not yet overwhelmed us.
It was obvious to postal patrons that Helen was in charge. After all, Andy was not the Postmaster, Helen was the "Postmistress," and therefore called the shots in the confined space of the Post Office. Everyone got the impression that Helen ruled the roost in their modest apartment across the street as well. She was a barrel-chested woman, while Andy was not much bigger than a ventriloquist's dummy. She wore flowered house dresses over which she strapped an apron such as bakers wear. She wore her hair in a net, and her feet were as flat as feet must be to support a body of such bulk. She wore lavender woolen carpet slippers and gray cotton stockings. The gray stockings and the flat shuffling feet encased in carpet slippers brought to mind a caged elephant. The store would tremble gently on its foundations as she plodded from the barred window to the worn wooden slots where she retrieved the mail from the lower shelves. She left the top three rows of slots to Andy, who would scramble to reach them from the top of a shaky step-stool.
Helen and Andy lived together, worked together, and presumably slept together as well. They were never out of sight of each other. It is said that two people so inseparable begin to look like and maybe even think as the other does. But as the years passed they looked less and less like each other and more and more like themselves.
No one knew them as well as Ernie. Helen and Andy were on the job long before Ernie opened the hardware store in the morning. They stayed back there for lunch. They would sit there behind the iron bars, in the middle of their unsorted mail, and grunt to each other as they ate something left over from the night before. Ernie couldn't help thinking how zoo-like it was. The Post Office rented the space from Ernie, and it was good for his business too; people would walk in for their mail and buy something on impulse from him as well.
As the town matured and grew from rural to suburban, Helen and Andy tried to keep up, but it was clear they had to expand. The Post Office decided to build a First Class Post Office building with a First Class Postperson. It would have been hard to imagine Helen Grogan as its manager. It meant Post Office boxes, packaging sales, and overseas mail. It meant Post Office vehicles and delivery men. It meant issuing passports and money orders . . . and it certainly meant NOT eating your lunch with the mail as your tablecloth.
It was good news for most of us in Westlake Village. Ernie, in his hardware store, rationalized it by being able to use the extra space as a "Home Decorating Center" . . . after all, the town was growing up and we must embrace gentrification.
"Lose money offa the rent?" Well, maybe; but a brand new Pizzeria was moving in next door -- hardware and Italian food go well together.
In short, then, the only rumblings of dissent came from Helen Grogan, and as the new Post Office took shape on Westwood Avenue, she became increasingly bellicose. I avoided picking up my mail, hoping that someone else might do it for me. Perhaps my wife might be curious enough to go down there to see if there was news from her father back home. Helen, in her Darth Vader voice, would bellow, "Hey you!! . . . pick it up!" and fling your mail through the barred window, then glare at you while you stooped to pick it up.
It couldn't have been pleasant for Andy, either. Ernie often told me later that he could hear yelps of pain from Andy back there in the corner. "I dunno, I guess he got in her way, or sumpin' . . . but two, three times a day, she'd give it to him good. Y'dint dast stand up to her -- she'd bust yer hump."
Her behavior should have warned us, but it didn't. Andy was one of the first postal workers to find himself a victim of P.O.V. (Post Office Violence). He was within reach whenever the madness overtook Helen . . . and she'd give him a good one. I suppose he figured that once it was out of her system, she'd leave him alone for a while, and maybe when this was all over, they could open that little drygoods store he always wanted. For a while he was right; she'd take a swipe at him with the mail bag, or kick him off the step stool when he was working on the top slots. Andy would pick himself and scuttle out of her way for a few minutes until it blew over.
Then it happened!
It was a week before the opening of the new "First Class" Post Office on Westwood Avenue, and already they were phasing out the old one. About 4:30 pm Helen and Andy decided to close the "Second Class" Post Office for the day.
"Night, Ernie," said Andy.
"Yeah, humph," said Helen
They stood in front of the store, and it looked to Ernie as though Andy wanted to go one way and Helen another. Suddenly, Helen reached down and grabbed Andy by the throat, picked him up off his feet, and began shaking him as a dog would shake his master's slipper. Ernie was reluctant to step outside and interfere and looked the other way for a moment or two. When he looked outside again, Helen was still shaking Andy, and as Ernie later told the police . . . "Poor little bastard, looked kinda limp to me, so I sez to myself I better step out there and stop it."
"Well," he went on, "I goes out there and I sez, 'Now Helen, take it easy -- put 'im down before you hurts 'im. She don't put him down, see . . . she takes 'im in one hand, like you woulda bagga flour in the store, y'know . . . an' throws 'im at me!"
Ernie wasn't expecting that, but he did catch Andy, and then he reeled backwards into the store. There didn't appear to be much life in Andy, so Ernie laid him on the counter. Helen followed him back into the store and stood at the counter and said:
"Sumbitch assole, drygutsore! . . . Bullshit!!" At least that's what it sounded like to Ernie. Ernie was a hardware man and had no knowledge of such things as drygoods.
Almost unobserved by both of them, Andy stirred a bit and seemed to be on the edge of coming out of it. His eyes were still bugged out to the extent that Ernie honestly felt they would fall out of his head. His nose and mouth were bleeding, too, from the cuffing and all. Ernie tried standing him up in front of the counter, but he went spindly all over and collapsed like an unstrung marionette. That's when Ernie called 911.
Andy went to the hospital of course, and Helen was charged with assault. Ernie tried to keep out of it, but like many innocent bystanders, he was the only reliable witness.
Old timers here in Westlake Village often recall that event. It's hard to believe it was more than 35 years ago. Our new First Class Post Office is beginning to show its age, and there have been events there as well. Two of the clerks have pulled revolvers on each other. One actually shot out an overhead fluorescent light above the counter. One of the postmen ran off with a sorter in a mail delivery vehicle and was later found in a motel in New Dorp, Pennsylvania. There seems to be something that triggers madness in postal workers and drives them to distraction.
Helen was certainly distracted, and distraught as well -- a simmering volcano. When a woman of her physical substance is pushed to the edge, things can become dangerous for everybody. Andy was beaten like a rented mule through no fault of his own. He thought a drygoods store might be the light at the end of the tunnel, whereas Helen thought it was the end of the road.