The Mayflower Community (Grinnell IA) “Wine and Writing” group is back at work, writing and critiquing. They now meet monthly to share their production and provide each other with feedback under the tutelage of Betty Moffett. Below is an offering from that group.
John Graves has been a Mayflower resident since his wife Margery and he moved from rural Newton in October of 2016. Retired as a county supervisor for Farmers Home Administration, USDA and as a part-time farmer, John has done his writing without the assistance of the wine! When you read the story below you may not believe that as the characters and their names are real!
Delly Poage vs. the U.S. Postal Service
We did not have a postmaster; we had a postmistress, Miss Fanny McClintic. She had been on the job so long that she was a tradition.
About the last part of the 1930’s or early 1940’s, the local postal service made a change in the rural mail routes. Several farmers had to walk a bit farther to get to their mailboxes.
One of these farmers was Delly Poage. He had a small, well-kept farm along Castile Creek and added to his income by hunting and trapping. He was very good at it. This required a great deal of walking. At age 70, he could probably still out-walk anyone in Clinton or Buchanan County.
He did not like having his mailbox moved and complained to Miss Fanny to no avail, so he wrote to the U.S. Postal Service in Washington, D.C. He said he was an old man and this was a hardship for him. The Postal Service wrote to Miss Fanny, asking about this complaint. She wrote back more or less as follows: “What Mr. Poage says is true. However, during the winter months he walks fifteen to twenty miles a day after his hounds and checking on his trip lines. We did not think it would hurt him to walk a little further to get his mail.”
Delly lost his case, but it did make a good story for the next several years.
— Bob Mann, Sales & Marketing Director