Nothing Stops the Rounds to General Delivery : Age-Old Postal Method Is Still Used Extensively

“My canoe?” the visitor from Norway wanted to know. Had his rubber canoe arrived at the general delivery window here from his last stop in Alaska?

He and his wife and friends, traveling the world, were cheered to see that it had, although the craft probably didn’t see extensive service during their two weeks in the Southland.

Also at the post office window at 9th Street and Broadway during the course of this particular day was Gloria Cortez of East Los Angeles. She was picking up her letters in person because they were what postal people refer to as Dog Mail.

Threatening Dog

When a carrier feels he or she is unable to deliver mail because of a threatening dog, the person at that address instead gets a notice (or notices that no mail is arriving), and winds up at general delivery.

“He is an Australian shepherd named Max and I always keep him tied up,” Cortez explained as she waited to have her letters handed across the counter. “Somehow he got loose, but it won’t happen again.”

The procession continued at the busiest such window in Southern California. Travelers, animal owners, street people without addresses, hotel residents who don’t trust the delivery where they live--all were taking advantage of a little-known function of the U.S. Postal Service.

It is the oldest method the Postal Service uses. Although not as much fun now as in Colonial time. In those days, general delivery was at the local pub.

It is 6:30 a.m. On the ground floor of what old-timers say used to be the Famous Department Store at 901 S. Broadway, clerk Jonetta Lewis is sorting the newly arrived mail.

In another two hours she will raise her window in the Metropolitan Station and the parade will begin. Lewis, who has been at the window seven years now, deals with more than 60,000 customers a year.

Name Still Counts

“This is one place in the world where your name still counts,” she said. “I sort by name, and I hand it out by name.”

Of necessity with mail, as is increasingly the case in modern society, everything is usually numbers. The course of a letter, according to local postal spokesman David Mazer, is that it first goes to a processing facility such as the Terminal Annex, where it is sorted by ZIP code.

From there it goes to a local post office, where it is sorted by the last two digits, which represent a neighborhood.

The carrier for that neighborhood, in turn, arranges his letters and so forth according to the addresses on his streets. “Although the carrier may do so, he or she doesn’t have to look at names,” Mazer said. “At only one place is it necessary for the Postal Service to do that.”

General delivery. It also is the only place where mail is sorted alphabetically, which Lewis would shortly do into bins with about 700 pieces she had brought over in a tray.

“First, however, I post-date each envelope with a rubber stamp--10 days ahead for domestic mail, 30 days for mail from overseas. That is the period during which the addressee must come to the window and pick it up.”

The dating completed, she places the mail in alphabetical slots. Then one final step: Transferring everything to another case, where the slots are further broken down to indicate the first initials (B-A for a letter for Betty Alexander).

It is 8:30 a.m. The window is raised. Let the names begin.

“She wrote two of them!” 23-year-old Paul Steiner of Australia exclaimed, clutching a pair of envelopes from his girlfriend back home, Ruth Lacey.

Both he and his fellow Aussie traveling companion, Malcolm Grumach, 23, are recent college graduates who decided to check out a little of the world before settling down.

Let Us Hear From Them

“We are going to be here a few days, and then drive to New York,” Steiner said. “I told Ruth and my parents, and Malcolm told his people to let us hear from them while we were in L.A. and New York.”

The letters they happily walked away with bore the words “Poste Restante,” the international designation for general delivery.

There is no extra charge for general delivery, no special stamp is required. The envelope gets no distinctive postmark.

The traveling party who earlier had received the canoe showed up again to see if anything further had arrived. Bjorn Skibenes, 25, of Norway, at the window with his two female and one male companions, said the craft was in the basement of the Norwegian Seaman’s Church in San Pedro.

“We are hoping the pictures we took in Alaska will get here before we leave for Hawaii in a few days,” he said, filling out a change-of-address card to have everything forwarded there.

By adhering to a schedule, a tourist can receive mail as he moves along, simply by informing correspondents of the approximate date he will be in a city.

Vacationers, though, are just a fraction of the traffic at general delivery.

There is a woman, her residence said to be the ground beneath a freeway, who stops by daily to check for possible mail from her mother or sister in Pennsylvania. Another woman arrives pushing a baby carriage filled with bags of her personal belongings.

Larry J. Moore, manager of the postal station, mentioned a man in clerical garb who is a regular at the window. “He gets his mail under several different names,” Moore said. “And sometimes he breaks into a serenade for Jonetta.”

Some of the scenes are poignant. “We know of people getting mail from relatives who know only that the person is living somewhere in L.A.,” Moore said.

Ship Household Goods

Newcomers to the city sometimes use the service to ship their household goods. “We have clothing and household furnishings arrive in suitcases and cartons,” Moore went on. “After the sender gets here and finds a permanent home, he stops by for his goods.”

As for the clerk on the front lines, she sees and hears it all. “People stop in and ask bus information. Sometimes someone will become furious when there is no mail, as if it is my fault. A letter from home often means money.”

Having heart goes with the territory. Although technically a person may make use of general delivery for 30 days only (after which the alternative is to rent a postal box), there are exceptions to this usually temporary service.

“So many people are living on the streets nowadays,” Lewis said. “For them, this is it. For them, we bend the rules and let them keep getting their mail here.”

One big reason is government checks, some of which are picked up at general delivery. “When I raise my window on the first of the month, there is always a line waiting for the veterans’ checks and the Supplemental Security Income checks,” the clerk said. “On the third of the month, it is for the Social Security checks.”

As a sign above the window warns, nothing is handed over without acceptable legal identification--a driver’s license or passport. But not a Social Security card by itself.

If the person has nothing to show, he is told to go to the Social Security office, where he may obtain a letter verifying his number and who he is.

“In the case of common names--John Smith, Mary Jones--we may ask for a middle initial. Or perhaps ask where the expected mail is from, or who the sender is,” Lewis explained. “I want something to assure me that you’re you.”

Another person in the parade to the window on this day was Barbara Wright, who used general delivery when she first came to Los Angeles, and liked the idea so much of getting letters in person that she has rented a postal box for the last five years.

She was at the window now because she had forgotten her key. Lewis recognized her, and fetched her mail out of the box.

“I live in an apartment that has mailboxes, but I feel more comfortable getting my correspondence this way,” Wright said. “More privacy and more security.”

A newcomer from Mississippi told the clerk she was staying at one of the lesser downtown hotels, and preferred coming to the Metro Station for her mail because she didn’t want anybody stealing it.

There is nobody around anymore who remembers it, but at one time in our history, making a personal appearance is what everybody had to do.

“Home delivery didn’t start until after the Civil War,” Jim Van Loozen said by phone from Washington, D.C.

Van Loozen, public affairs officer with the Postal Service, pointed out that postal service began when the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia in 1775, agreed that a postmaster general should be appointed. The first one was Benjamin Franklin.

Prior to that, in instances of mail arriving from overseas, it was consigned to the captain of the ship, who would see that it reached a local pub, according to Mazer. Residents would call there for it, along with getting the local letters--the birth of general delivery.

Although general delivery at post offices was the prevailing practice during the beginning decades of our nation, it gradually began taking less and less of a role.

Its current usage is mostly in sparsely settled areas where no delivery is available and--in heavily settled metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles--by newcomers, travelers, street people, dog owners.

A vicious dog near a mailbox isn’t a laughing matter to carriers. More than 6,000 delivery persons are bitten in the U.S. annually while making their appointed rounds.

If a domestic letter at general delivery isn’t claimed within 10 days or a foreign letter within 30 days, it is returned to the sender. If no sender is apparent, the epistle is dispatched to the dead letter office in San Francisco--the only branch of the Postal Service allowed to open a piece of mail.

“While I am checking a certain slot for someone at the window, I pull any other letters whose dates have expired,” Lewis said. “Once a month I go through all the slots for the same reason.”

Her customers are from such scattered areas of the city as Eagle Rock, South-Central Los Angeles, West Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, Hollywood. The same operation is done on a smaller scale in many of the neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley, in Pacific Palisades and in San Pedro, and in post offices for the incorporated communities of the county.

At this, the busiest such location, 3 p.m. had arrived and Lewis lowered the window. Tomorrow would see another episode of General Delivery--the longest-playing soap opera of them all.