What’s a postie? Older readers from Canada, and probably those from Commonwealth countries, might know. American readers, not so much. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word as “letter carrier” and says its origin is British. Synonyms would be “mail carrier, mailman, postman”. In my youth when I lived in Canada, the term was widely-used. I know that for a fact, because for a year and a half I was one in the city of Vancouver. It was a common experience to be on the job, making my rounds, and hearing someone calling out “Oh Postie!” when they wanted to get my attention. My spell as a postie lasted from March of 1971 to September of 1972 – not a long time, but certainly an eventful one. It was a colorful and interesting time, and I’d like to share some of the more memorable moments with you.

Before I begin, there are some events that I need to tell you about that led up to that period of time. Some of these things may shock you or disappoint you, others I’m not proud of, but they happened and I can’t change the past. They are, however, relevant to my days as a postie.

We need to go back to early November of 1970. There were 6 of us (at least) living together in a house in Vancouver, all hippie-types. Only one of us had a full-time job, and one other worked part-time. The rest of us were just lazy layabouts, up until all hours of the night doing hippie things (let your imaginations run wild) and sleeping late. One morning I was rudely awakened by 2 men I didn’t know at around 10:00 AM. I shared a bedroom with one other guy who wasn’t home at the time (he was the one with a full-time job). They said they were narcotics officers with the Vancouver Police Department – it was obvious they were looking for something. The room had 2 single beds, a small closet with a few clothes on hangers and an old dresser. As they were looking through the dresser drawers, they found a small bag of marijuana. They asked who used the dresser and I said that both myself and the other fellow who slept in that room used it. Now this detail is important – there were 4 drawers in the dresser. I used 2 of them, my room-mate the other 2. They asked which were the 2 that I used, and I told them the top 2, and that my room-mate used the bottom 2. The baggie had been found in the second drawer down, so in one of my drawers. They seemed disappointed that that’s all they found. Buried in the back yard was the main household stash, and in the hollowed-out Bible on the mantel shelf in the living-room was a sizable chunk of hashish, none of which they found. In any case, they told me to get dressed, that they were taking me downtown to book me for possession of marijuana. One other fellow was home, and as they walked me past him I told him to call my girlfriend (her friend worked as the secretary for a lawyer and I figured they’d take care of me). They put me into their un-marked police car parked out front, drove me downtown and booked me.

So there I was, sitting on the Group W bench in a large holding cell with a dozen others all waiting to learn their fate. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Arlo Guthrie song “Alice’s Restaurant”, this link will give you some background about the Group W bench, and it’s well worth reading. A few hours later, my name was called and I was escorted down to a courtroom. My buddy and my girlfriend were there, as was the young attorney representing me. He briefly pleaded my case and the judge agreed to release me on my own recognizance, and I went home with a future court date hanging over my head. A couple of days later, I met with the attorney in his office and the first thing he advised me to do was to go out and buy a short-hair wig to cover up my long hair so I’d make a better impression in court. I found a good one for 55 bucks at a wig store, one made of real human hair. It was a good investment and would be used a lot in the future. Here’s a picture of me at the time – hard to imagine all that hair fitting under a short-hair wig, right? But it did. There was one more meeting with my attorney to plan strategy, and finally my court date arrived. Here follows the never-before-told story of my day in court.

Those were the days.

There were plenty of people in the courtroom, as a number of cases were on the docket for that day. My case was finally announced, and my attorney wanted to cross-examine the two arresting officers. Each appeared alone on the witness stand with the other one not present inside the courtroom at the time. My attorney first established that 2 of us used the dresser and which of us used which part. He questioned the first officer about the fine details of the arrest, and he admitted that the baggie had been found in the second drawer down from the top. Immediately afterwards, he questioned the second officer (the first one had already left the courtroom), and that officer said that the baggie had been found in the second drawer up from the bottom. Well, that was all the judge needed to hear – the two officers had directly contradicted each other, throwing into doubt the ownership of the baggie, and he threw the case out, finding in my favor. I was overjoyed, and as I was shaking my attorney’s hand, several other people came up to him and asked for his business card so he could represent them or their friends. All of that representation had cost me the sum of $250, and it was worth every penny. That evening, my girlfriend, along with her girlfriend (the attorney’s secretary) and I all met at the attorney’s home to celebrate by smoking copious amounts of marijuana. He had only been admitted to the bar a year before, so his practice was still in its infancy. I Googled him and found that he still practices law to this day, having become a very prestigious attorney who has defended cases all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada and in several American states. I will protect his privacy, of course. To think that all that fuss was over something that is now completely legal in Canada, the recreational use of marijuana.

Well, now that the drama of my arrest and acquittal was over, I figured it was about time to seek gainful employment. Someone suggested that I look into working for the Post Office, so I went and wrote the Civil Service exams. That seemed easy enough, and a month later they hired me. In those days, they didn’t much care for long-haired hippie freaks like me, so I wore my short-hair wig for the exams. Ditto for the actual start of my employment. Can you imagine that, all of my long hair piled up and held in place with bobby pins, then covered with the wig? Every day for 6 months (what was known as my probation period), I faithfully pinned my hair up and went to work and did my job. During those 6 months, they could have fired me for even the slightest transgression.

Once off probation, though, I belonged to the rather militant LCUC, or Letter Carriers Union of Canada. The union would really go to bat for you, and sure wasn’t going to take any crap from the federal government, my employer. I still remember it vividly, as if it happened yesterday. The day after my 6 months of probation was up, I walked into the Post Office, no wig, with my hair down. It was like they said in the Crosby, Stills and Nash song “Almost Cut My Hair” from their Déjà Vu album, “I feel like letting my freak flag fly”. The station manager was horrified – he told me that he’d always thought of me as a fine young man who had been doing a good job. I replied that I was still the same young man, and yes, I had been doing a good job and would continue to do so, long hair or not. He and everyone else in the postal station had no choice but to accept the “new” me. There were other long-hairs working for the Post Office, but they had let their hair grow out once their probationary period was up, under the protective umbrella of the union. Mine was more of a “cold turkey” approach.

Now that I was a full-fledged postie, I settled into the work routine at Station G near my home, which turned out to be an interesting place to work. There was nothing boring about the place because of the interesting characters who worked there. All of the routes done out of that station were walking routes – none of us drove a postal vehicle. Out the front door of the station was a city bus stop, and while in uniform we rode for free. The bus would take us to within a block or so of the start of our routes and from there it was all on foot.

When we arrived at the station, we would go to our spot inside and sort our mail. It would be sitting on the floor in canvas bags beside us. We would open each bag (they had already been pre-sorted downtown into the specific routes) and then sort every piece into hundreds of labeled slots in a large case standing in front of us – smaller slots for letters, larger ones for magazines. This took an hour or more, depending on volume, and while we sorted, all kinds of lively banter took place. There were about 30 routes, each of which had an assigned number – for example, mine was 18. The station supervisor would call out our numbers, in order, to come up to his window and sign for our registered letters for the day. These were handled with kid gloves and we were highly accountable for each one, having to get a signature from each addressee when we delivered them on our route. Now hold that thought, I’ll come back to it in a moment.

In Canada back in the day, every adult knew what a 26er was. In the US, it would be a fifth of hard liquor, but in Canada it was a 26-ounce bottle, of whiskey, for example. An older fellow, quite cantankerous, had route 26. By the time the supervisor had worked his way up through the numbers for us to come and get our “registers”, we all looked forward to the moment he called out “26!”. As soon as he did, every one of us in the station shouted out with one voice “twenty-six!!” to poke fun at that guy, and he would come back with “Go to hell, you assholes!” or some variation thereof. This happened every day, without fail, and was all in good fun.

There were unofficial groups of us in the station, and there was some derogatory name for each. For example, the long-haired younger guys like me were derisively known to the older guys as “hippie faggots”; the oldest guys were the “war heroes”, and so it went – nobody escaped the name-calling, but at the end of the day, it was all in good fun. Sometimes one of us would call out “There’s just too much mail – I can’t stand it any more, I’m revolting!” and everyone else would immediately holler out “You can say that again!”

There were all kinds of Postie tall tales bandied about, to the amusement of all. For example, someone would say that on a particularly cold day, when they rang the doorbell to get a signature for a registered letter, the lady of the house appeared at the door in a see-through negligee and said “Postie, would you like to come in for something hot?”

All posties had run-ins with mean dogs, and we had zero tolerance for any such event. One day, as I walked through a customer’s front gate, their dog came rushing at me in a threatening manner. I backed out of the yard, and when I was back at the station I filled out the proper form and cut them off from home delivery. Their only option was to come to the station, many miles away, and pick up their mail in person. They called my supervisor to complain and were promptly told that as long as their dog was running loose inside the fenced front yard (which I had to cross to get to the mail slot in the front door) their mail delivery was suspended. They finally smartened up after several days of no delivery.

Another time, in a very ritzy neighborhood of fine homes, a German shepherd spotted me and came running down the street to attack me. I grabbed the can of mace sitting on my belt and sprayed him full in the face – it hardly fazed him, even though I emptied the whole can on him. I managed to beat a hasty retreat without injury, and when I got back to the station I cut off delivery for the entire street. I knew the address where the dog lived, and my supervisor contacted the owner and said that unless he kept the dog locked up and not running loose, the whole street was cut off. Well, the owner was belligerent, saying that nobody was going to tell him how to run his affairs. Once all of his neighbors up and down the street started calling the station to complain that their mail hadn’t been delivered, they were told that it was because of that dog owner’s behavior that their mail was cut off. They had the option, of course, of driving miles to the station to pick up their mail each day in person. It took several days for the idiot to come to his senses and lock his dog up, but probably only after his neighbors were threatening him with all kinds of mayhem.

An old-timer who trained me (I helped him on his route) told me that many years before, a big dog had bitten him on the chest, and by the time he made it back to the station he could feel the blood squishing in his shoes. He ended up in the hospital. Zero tolerance.

As a postie, I was only bitten once by a dog. It was kind of an odd occurrence the way it happened. I walked up to the front door of a house and bent down to put the mail through the slot in the door. Unbeknownst to me, the dog was waiting behind the door. As I pushed the letters into the slot, the dog saw my fingers and bit me. I never saw the dog, but felt a sharp pain. I yanked my hand back and saw that the end of one finger had been torn open. Following our rules, I immediately returned to the station, which was only a couple of blocks away. When the supervisor saw all the blood, he immediately drove me to a nearby doctor who bandaged me up and gave me a tetanus shot – I was done for the day. There was no lasting damage and I was back at work a few days later. Since the dog was inside the home and not running loose outside, there was no blame laid on it or the homeowner. I did get some small satisfaction, however, the next several times I was back at that house delivering their mail. I would carefully push the letters through the slot but kept a firm grip on them from outside. The dog grabbed the letters and tore them to shreds while I held on nice and tight. After doing this for a number of days, I noticed that the dog was no longer waiting for me inside. I guess the owner got tired of the dog shredding his mail and kept it in another room during the day when the mail was delivered and he was away at work. A postscript to this story – the letter-carrier’s union got wind of this dog-bite incident and, with their full backing, pestered me for months to sue the homeowner. I never did, instead having the satisfaction of knowing the dog was blamed for destroying the mail.

Okay, back to the time I was busted for the marijuana. I clearly remembered the names of the 2 officers who had arrested me and testified in court against me. At the time, there was a newspaper published weekly in Vancouver and widely-distributed throughout western Canada, and it was called the Georgia Straight (a play on the name Strait of Georgia, which is the channel that separates Vancouver Island from the mainland of BC). It was considered an underground publication and ran all kinds of hippie-oriented content. One thing they did was publish all the names of people arrested on drug charges, and my name appeared for all to see. However, they encouraged their readers to submit the names and home addresses of any narcotics officers (“narcs”, as we called them) that were known. Well, they say that karma is a bitch, right? One day I was covering a route for a postie who was out sick, and I happened to notice, that as I walked up to the door of a basement suite in a quiet neighborhood, the name on the mail for that address. It was a highly unusual name and exactly matched the name of one of the undercover narcs who had busted me. A quick look at envelopes verified that he was indeed a Vancouver police officer – gotcha! I was only on that route the one day, but I did my hippie duty and reported his name and address promptly to the Georgia Straight where it was published for all to see.

During the time period I was on probation as a postie and wearing my short-hair wig,  I was delivering the mail on a specific route every day. As soon as I was off probation, I put in a bid for that route and it was mine. Off came the wig, and of course I kept delivering the mail on that same route. Well, complaints started pouring in to my supervisor from people who lived on my route. “There’s this awful long-haired hippie who is delivering my mail now and I want a new postie.” My boss would have to explain to them that it was my route and there was no power on earth that could remove me (remember the powerful and militant letter-carriers union). Unless there was a major problem with how I was doing my job, that customer (and all the others who complained about my hair) were stuck with me. I loved the sense of freedom I had for the remaining year I worked at that job.

So there you have it, Folks, some of the highlights of my short career as a hippie letter carrier in the fair city of Vancouver. Ah, those were the days. I can still hear the refrain “Oh Postie!” being called out to me as I made my rounds, and it brings back fond memories.