For the first time in history, the Postmaster for the City of Gillett is a woman. While she has been in charge for of the city’s post office for quite a few months now, just recently Melissa A. Tarlton was officially named to the post. Piror to this appointment, Melissa was the Postmaster in Townsend. She follows a long line of Postmasters dating back to May 15, 1871 (1871!!!) when the Gillett Post Office was established and Rodney Gillett was named the first Postmaster.

            Melissa is the nineteenth Postmaster, each who have served a tenure of somewhere between one year and 23 years. While I didn’t recognize many of the names – except, of course, for Mr. Gillett – I did notice that a couple names probably still have local connections, if not others that I just can’t place. For instance, Matthew Finnegan served as Postmaster from 1895 to 1899 and I wonder if it is his family name behind Finnegan Lake, where a successful fishing tournament was held the last weekend in February. One name I recognized was Frederick John (appointed in 1900) and another familiar last name that I believe still has family in town was J.M. Melchior, who was appointed in 1913.

            Robert Anderson was the longest serving Postmaster, appointed in 1971 and serving until Patrick Roberts replaced him in 1994. Pat retried last year and Melissa has been filling the position since his retirement until the announcement of her appointment this past month.

            Now one name that surprised me was someone named Robert Hicks, who was appointed in 1960. When Melissa mentioned his name to me and the approximate time of his service, I quickly calculated that I was too young in 1960 to probably even know what  Postmaster was, and since at that time living on the farm we spent a very little time in the City of Gillett, I probably wouldn’t have recognized him from behind the counter.

            I ran into Bob a few minutes after this conversation, since he still makes the trek to the Post Office every day to get his mail, and asked him about his time as Postmaster. He laughed and said he had been named Postmaster in 1960 during Eisenhower’s presidency and after Kennedy was elected in November of 1960, well, he was out of a job soon thereafter. That’s the way it was back then, he said.

            My conversations with Melissa have reminded me that I can barely remember a time when we visited the post office while I was growing up. All of our business was conducted through the mailbox at the end of our driveway on the west side of the road – much of it still is. We put money for stamps (I can remember 5-cent stamps but don’t ask me to date myself any earlier than that) in a plastic glass along with our outgoing mail in the mailbox in the morning and when we got the mail later in the day we had our stamps. This was also the time of huge Sears and Spiegel catalogs and since long-distance telephone calls were expensive we did much of our communication by mail. Just the other day I found a recipe my grandmother, Bea Heier, sent my mother in the mid-1960’s. I recognized my grandmother’s handwriting immediately, as I always do my mother’s, and was so pleased to have found another tangible link to their mother-daughter relationship. Today I guess there would be an e-mail offering immediate results or perhaps just a note suggesting a link to another website where the recipe could be found.

            The U.S. Postal Service has one of the more popular internet sites in the world, one that is accessed by customers more than one million times a day. Just about anything you can do at a Post Office you can do at the award-winning website, www.usps.com. By accessing this website, you can buy postage, order supplies, ship and track packages, and manage their mail without ever leaving your home or office.

            On Friday, March 16, the Gillett Post Office will host USPS.com week. The staff will conduct lobby computer demonstrations showing customers how easy it is to use the internet website and refreshments will be provided.

            Our congratulations to Melissa Tarlton on her appointment as the newest Postmaster for the City of Gillett. You can stop by anytime to say hello, but if you can stop by on March 16, you’ll learn something about the U.S. Post Office website and maybe even get a cookie for your effort.