The Chicago post office scandal

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1994 by Charles Nicodemus

For Ormer C. Rogers, Jr., the road to Kansas City was paved with good intentions. Not that Kansas City is hell, but it is the place where Ormer Rogers--the Chicago area's top postal official--was sent after he decided to get a handle on just how bad mail service was in Chicago's five long-troubled north lakefront postal districts.

You may have heard about Chicago's mail problems once they became a nationally publicized headache for the post office. What you might not know is that the chain of events that helped sink Ormer Rogers was set in motion by a disgruntled customer. In late November 1993, a man named Jerry Stevens failed to get mail for the fourth day in a row. Stevens, who lives in one of Chicago's north lakefront postal districts, helps run a party planning service that is dependent on diligent mail deliveries. In search of his missing mail, Stevens went to the Graceland station and--while waiting for a clerk to check on anything that might have been left behind--he strayed briefly through a pair of double Dutch doors and into a work area. There, Stevens said he saw a small mountain of undelivered mail "as wide as my apartment building." When the clerk reported there was nothing there for Stevens, he went home and, steaming with indignation, called one of the post office's central complaint numbers.

As postal inspectors would later note, those central information and complaint lines might ring as often as 85 times without being answered. But as bad luck (for the post office) would have it, Stevens got through quickly and reported what he had seen. A half hour later Stevens got a call from a "Mr. Bizbee," who said he was the Graceland station manager. He made a perfunctory apology for Stevens' poor mail service, and then--according to Stevens--Bizbee added: "The next time you visit our station, if you set one foot inside those Dutch doors again, you'll be subject to arrest." Security of the mails, and so forth.

Seething, Stevens called a reporter friend. An ensuing story detailed Stevens' experience and other postal problems along the north lakefront, problems that had been festering for years despite customer complaints and increasingly bitter protests from the area's congressman, Rep. Sidney Yates.

The mid-December news story, coming a month after yet another angry Yates letter to Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, led Rogers to order his staff and a team of postal inspectors to find out just how bad things really were "up north." The resulting two-pronged inquiry took the hide off Chicago Postmaster Jimmie Mason's north lakefront operations and found that many of the problems were citywide. Yet Mason did little except write Rogers an upbeat memo that promised reform without providing substance. In response to that lack of response, members of Rogers' staff leaked copies of the two investigative reports.

These reports, which hit the city like bombshells, revealed that:

* Mammoth mounds of undelivered mail were found at several stations--including one pile 800 feet long, nearly the length of three football fields.

* Information and complaint phones sometimes rang scores of times before being answered--if they were answered at all.

* Mail deliveries frequently were late or were skipped; many carriers lost mail, failed to deliver it, or didn't forward it for weeks or months. Other carriers didn't want to go out in the cold, or came in when it got dark without checking with supervisors.

* Lines were lengthy and waits interminable at postal station windows; lobbies were dingy and filthy; stamp and envelope vending machines didn't work; clerks were surly and unhelpful; and vacation "holds" on mail weren't started or weren't stopped.

* Discipline was erratic and frequently ineffective and morale was too often in the toilet. Workers complained that on-the-job drug and alcohol abuse sometimes went unpunished.

Hard working, conscientious carriers and postal station workers too often were discouraged by the chaos around them. The performance of even the best, most dedicated employees suffered as a result. Adding names and faces to these investigative findings were individual horror stories from postal customers who had phoned, faxed, messengered--and even mailed in--their complaints to reporters after the December story had run.

Before, during, and after this series of disclosures, there was more bad news. One carrier was found with 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail--some more than two months old--stashed in the back of his uninspected delivery truck. Another 20,000 pieces, some 11 years old, were found when the basement of a retired carrier's home was cleaned out. Nearly 200 pounds of commercial mail was found burning beneath a railroad viaduct and more than a ton of undelivered mail was found when fire broke out in a Chicago carrier's suburban condo. Fifteen hundred pieces of mail, much of it five years old, were found beneath the back porch of an ex-carrier's former home, and a rural letter carrier, who took his car in for new shocks, stunned mechanics when they found his trunk full of old mail.