The U.S. Postal Service may be ending Saturday delivery, but did you know Rock Hudson, Walt Disney, and these other celebrities once helped deliver the mail?
At the height of his Hollywood fame, Rock Hudson had an assistant who answered his fan mail. But as a high-school student in Winnetka, Ill., he was an actual letter carrier. Among the apocryphal stories Hudson told about himself is that he was discovered by his agent, Henry Willson, after he learned that Willson was along his postal route and delivered a photograph of himself.
While starting out as a stage actor in Philadelphia, Sherman Hemsley worked as a postal worker to pay for night classes at the Academy of Dramatic Arts. Then in 1967, after deciding to move to New York to pursue his career, Hemsley put in for a transfer so he could maintain his day job. Soon after his arrival, Hemsley was movin’ on up—as a Broadway star and eventually in his signature role as George Jefferson on All in the Family and its spinoff, The Jeffersons.
In 1833, President Andrew Jackson appointed Abraham Lincoln postmaster of New Salem, Ill. Though the position didn’t pay much, it wasn’t full-time either, allowing Lincoln to take on odd jobs—chopping wood, splitting rails, and handling simple legal matters—to supplement the $55-a-year salary. And whenever he traveled for work, Lincoln often delivered letters personally to neighbors, carrying mail in his stovepipe hat. Lincoln wasn’t the only former postmaster to reach the White House—Harry Truman once held the position in Grandview, Mo.
Library of Congress
In 1969, after more than a decade as a postal worker, Charles Bukowski was desperately unhappy and wrote to a friend: “I have one of two choices—stay in the post office and go crazy… or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” Two years later, he published his first novel, Post Office, which featured his literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski.
Nearly a decade before the expression “going postal” was coined, a shy post-office worker named David Berkowitz terrified New Yorkers with a series of killings known as the “Son of Sam” murders. In a 1999 New York Times article, Berkowitz, who is still in prison, admitted that if he had not been a serial killer, he probably would have ended up “married with a wife and kids in the suburbs, making a living, working in the post office.”
AP
Many Hollywood success stories begin in the mailroom of a talent agency. Walt Disney’s included a stint at the actual post office: in 1918, a decade before directing Steamboat Willie, Disney was working as a mail sorter and substitute carrier in Chicago. Later, Disney received two posthumous honors from his old employers—in 1968, he was featured on a United States stamp, and in 1994, the post office in his hometown of Marceline, Mo., was renamed in his honor.
As an air-mail pilot for the United States Post Office in the 1920s, Charles Lindbergh survived some hazardous deliveries—including two instances when he was forced to parachute from his plane. Two months after completing his historic 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, the U.S. Post Office issued a 10-cent air-mail stamp with his name on it, the first time a living person had ever been honored on a stamp. And though he was retired from postal duty, Lindbergh remained an advocate for air-mail service, frequently carrying souvenir mail on his flights.
Several years before publishing his first novel, William Faulkner took a position as the postmaster at the University of Mississippi. But after three years on the job, Faulkner apparently couldn’t take it anymore. In October 1924, he wrote the following letter to his boss: “As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.” Sixty-three years later, however, there were apparently no hard feelings: the United States Post Office issued a Faulkner commemorative stamp—for 22 cents.
Before becoming a legendary hotel magnate, Conrad Hilton was a hardworking young man who operated his father’s general store in San Antonio, N.M., and also became the town’s postmaster.
Among the two most famous postal workers in sitcom history—the other is Cliff Clavin from Cheers—Wayne Knight’s Newman revealed many secrets about his profession, including that ZIP codes are meaningless and there is no such thing as junk mail. Newman also once shared a route with Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz and even double-dated with him. But it was Newman’s declaration in episode “The Lip Reader” that offered the most sinister fact about the Post Office: “When you control the mail, you control information.”
