UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Pity the federal worker who after today will be responsible for waiting on customers inside the one-person U.S. Postal Service substation on the sprawling Penn State University campus.
After all, everyone in line — from shy freshmen to the most senior professor — will know instantly this is not the lanky septuagenarian with colorful ties and an unrelenting wit who for decades turned acts as ordinary as buying a postage stamp into something magical.
Penn State’s much-adored mailman has a name. For the record, it’s Mike Herr.
But on the 47,000-student campus, he’s known as simply “Mike the Mailman.”
He is retiring this afternoon, exactly 48 years to the day after he first donned a postal uniform on April Fools’ Day 1968.
If the loss of one civil servant seems easily overlooked in a place as mammoth as a land-grant university, then you haven’t been on the ground floor of McAllister building lately, watching as patrons queue up — a few practically in tears — as they say goodbye.
It’s hard to tell what’s more striking about the 70-year-old Lock Haven native who works behind a blue customer counter — how many waiting in line he recognizes, or how easy it is for him to banter with new faces.
“He makes you feel like he’s known you forever, and I had never met him before,” said freshman Maddie Turner, 18, of Lawrenceville, N.J., recalling her first time inside the place where the walls are adorned with personal photos, campus memorabilia and messages like “We are a team” and also this:
“Remember: You can always ‘push the envelope’ but it will always remain Stationery!”
With enthusiasm, he offers to stamp onto some letters and packages being mailed from his substation the message “Who loves ya baby” or “I sent this two weeks ago,” a handy line for an undergraduate who forgot an obligation back home.
“I put that one on a lot of them — birthdays, Mother’s Day. It really works,’’ Mr. Herr said with a mischievous grin.
A cardboard sign that reads “Nice Sneakers” usually is within arm’s reach, as is a small silver bell, both of which he raised instantly one day last week after spotting footwear in line that stood out.
“ You, you …. and you,” he said, ringing the bell and pointing his finger downward at the colorful sneakers that caught his eye.
No doubt, some of the shtick is owed to lines he simply has had decades to develop and a captive audience of tens of thousands on which to perfect them.
But it takes the timing and gumption of a stand-up comic to spot in a split-second, customer after customer, something he can latch onto so he can begin playful conversation — even as he works a register and shifts his body from side to side to do what he must to get their mail moving.
Their hair. Their nails. Even the awkward chemistry between two young undergrads who just might be dating.
“Does your mother know about him?” Mr. Herr asks.
To the customer who begins a transaction by saying she lacks a stamp, Mr. Herr deadpans, “Well, your instincts were good. You knew exactly where to come.”
After watching another fumble with a package, Mr. Herr asks, “What do you do at 6:03 AM Wednesdays?”
After the surprised woman replies, “sleep,” Mr. Herr delivers the payoff line: “Well, I have a remedial wrapping class that I would love for you to attend.”
Mr. Herr is almost always on but occasionally gets serious long enough to give a glimpse into his philosophy.
“I’m not a holy roller. I have my personal faults,” he said. “But I just think there’s not enough kindness in this world, and if I can do this one person at a time, maybe it snowballs.”
“If I can make someone laugh in the three or four minutes they are here, that’s pretty good.”
In doing so, he renders something valuable to stressed-out young adults living away from home for the first time. After all, a college campus can be an exhausting and impersonal place. But Mr. Herr is able to briefly shrink it down to manageable size.
Mr. Herr graduated in 1967 from what was then Williamsport Area Community College. His associate degree in engineering computer science technology dates to the days of computer punch cards.
Like many who have passed through the campus where he now works, he chose to study one thing in college, then spent his life doing something entirely different.
Unhappy that his career prospects after college would likely lead him out of state, he cast around in odd jobs closer to home until his father suggested the post office. He began in State College in 1968; several years later moved to University Park.
Plenty in the world has changed since his first day as a postal employee. Man walked on the moon. The Berlin Wall fell. Phones that once were rotary dial became push-button, mobile and eventually smart.
On the campus where he works, Mr. Herr walks among academics with sentence-long job titles and a few people with wallets fat enough that their name just might end up on a campus building one day.
But in his own way, Mr. Herr casts a long shadow, too.
Consider Michael Aitkenhead, a high school teacher in Connecticut, named teacher of the year in 2009 by Westport Public Schools officials. The Penn State graduate stepped onstage in that state and singled out the man on campus who took the most ordinary of jobs and made it special.
The “CBS Evening News” aired part of the speech in 2013 during a segment on Mr. Herr.
Mr. Aitkenhead said that although the professors who taught him on the campus have faded from memory, “The one person I’m always going to remember and probably taught me the most in life was actually Mike the Mailman.”
“He taught me that it isn’t necessarily what you do that matters,” he said, “but how you do it, and I’ve carried that with me into my teaching.”
Last week on campus, some recalled how Mr. Herr once was honorary homecoming parade grand marshal and, as part of an effort to orient freshmen, served as a barista at a campus Starbucks.
Then there was what some call “The Great Rally of 2000.” A new postmaster had decided the memorabilia on the walls had to come down, so students organized a march with protest signs, including one that read “Mike is the Man.”
A photo of that rally adorns a wall inside the postal substation a decade and a half later, just above the words “Never to be forgotten.”
Among those who came calling last week was Xiaoyi Ma, 25, a master’s civil engineering student who eagerly took a selfie of himself with Mr. Herr. The reason it was so important to him goes back several years to when he first arrived from China as an undergraduate, unfamiliar with his surroundings.
An extremely helpful postal worker guided him through his first visit to a post office. Then the man did something that so floored the young student he told his mother back home.
Mr. Herr looked him straight in the eye and said “Xiexie” — thank you in Chinese.
“Wow!,” he remembers thinking.
Then again, it’s simply what Mr. Herr does. Behind the customer counter he keeps several dozen handwritten signs, each of which says in a different language, “Relax,” knowing that a campus with a large international student population living far from home can use the friendly advice.
His message was similar last week to a woman who needed help wrapping up a box.
“Next time you’ll be a pro, and if you’re not, I’m still here, he said, quickly adding: “For a couple days anyway.”
Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1977 and on Twitter: @BschacknerPG.
First Published: April 1, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
