Cape's postmaster retires this week

Cape Girardeau postmaster Mike Keefe says looking back on his start in the postal service feels like flipping on the History Channel.

"When I started, we did things a lot like Benjamin Franklin did back in his day. Most everything was done manually. Very few things were done by machines. Today it's all automated," he said.

Franklin was the nation's first postmaster general.

Keefe, now 60, will retire Thursday. Evie Tan-Todd, a postmaster from the Olathe, Kan., office, will fulfill his duties until Keefe's replacement is hired.

Keefe began his career in 1971 as a postal clerk in Davenport, Iowa. It wasn't long before he realized he wanted to get out from behind the desk and into the field to learn the job.

"The carriers were the ones who were outside. You had Sundays off, you kind of had more freedom in your life, so I decided I wanted to do that," he said.

For six years Keefe walked door to door delivering letters affixed with the eight-cent postage stamp. Back then, Keefe said, a carrier could only deliver mail to about 400 residences per day because most mailboxes were next to the door instead of out by the road or clustered together. Today a letter carrier is able to deliver mail to about 600 boxes.

Keefe said carriers have lost some of the personal contact of the old days. "When I carried mail, the same people lived in the same houses their entire life, so you got to know their families, their children, everything about them," he said.

Keefe made stops at places like Webster City, Iowa, Fort Dodge, Kan., and St. Louis as he moved up the ranks. He was appointed Cape Girardeau's postmaster in 1986.

At that time Cape Girardeau was a processing center where mail destined for 50 area offices -- anything with a ZIP code beginning with 637 -- was sorted. Today, Cape Girardeau is a centralized delivery center where mail is sorted for 158 offices extending through the Bootheel. The area also has a processing center on Kell Farm Drive and a satellite office on North Kingshighway. The system has grown from 87 employees to 225.

There have been struggles along the way.

The post office renovated its Frederick Street office in a $1.5 million project that relocated mail services to Christine Street for three years and brought rafts of complaints from customers and city hall. But Keefe said he is proud of the way his office handled the transition. "Quite frankly, we never missed a beat," he said.

Dan Strauss, manager of customer services, has worked for Keefe for three years. "Mike has a couple things he's pretty strong on. Those are customer service, and he cares about his employees more than anything else," Strauss said. "He puts the family before pretty much everything else."

In retirement, Keefe plans to spend as much time as possible with his family.

But he will always be a postman at heart.

"E-mail is fine, cell phones are fine. I have them both, but nothing is more fun than opening up a letter from one of my children saying happy Father's Day or if you've been sick a letter saying get well soon," he said. "Those are the things that, if the post office didn't exist, I think people would really miss."

tgreaney@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245