ST. HELENA — If you live in St. Helena, there’s a good chance Gordie Adams knows your address, what you’ve been buying online, and a little bit about what’s happening in your life.
That might sound alarming to outsiders, but St. Helenans who’ve gotten to know and love the cheerful and gregarious mailman wouldn’t have it any other way.
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“I could very easily walk past people and continue on my route, but I like knowing about them,” said Adams, who’s retiring in February after an affectionate farewell tour of each of the city’s mail routes.
Adams joined the St. Helena Post Office on Oct. 22, 1988. He was hired by then-Postmaster Peter Mennen, who usually had a faithful parrot named Ricki Lake perched on his shoulder.
In a post office — and a town — full of characters, Adams fit right in. During his off hours he would jam in the post office basement, a former fallout shelter, with his rock band Four Eyes.
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Adams started out as a “swing carrier” rotating among all of St. Helena’s mail routes. That’s how he got to know the addresses of everyone in town — literally everyone. He compared his memory for street addresses with his childhood hobby of collecting and collating comic books.
With his love of comics, monster movies, heavy metal and skateboarding, Adams can come across as an overgrown teenager, a description he happily embraces.
He’s forged friendships with everyone from the elderly — he’s happy to take a few extra steps if he knows you’re having trouble getting out to your mailbox — to kids who’ve fallen in love with his handmade Christmas cards.
Even dogs love him, except for a toothless old German shepherd who once gave him a harmless gumming. His perfect record of never having been bitten ended after a run-in with a feisty chihuahua, but Adams took it in stride.
Adams was an avid skateboarder as a youth, but he stopped when he became a mailman because he didn’t want to risk an injury that would affect his ability to walk. He got back into it about 10 years later, becoming a regular at the old half-pipe at Crane Park.
He was instrumental in the development of the St. Helena Skate Park in the mid-2000s, advocating as a sort of elder statesman on behalf of young skateboarders.
“I wanted older people to understand this wasn’t just about destruction and graffiti and all those bad things that get associated with skateboarding,” he said.
Adams’ job has made him privy to plenty of secrets. “I’ve known people are getting divorced even before they do,” he said drily. But he takes confidentiality seriously, and he long ago vowed to “only use my knowledge for good.”
For example, when a local man found a Visa card on the ground, he turned not to the police department but to Adams, who promptly delivered it to the owner’s door. He’s helped elderly people who’d fallen in their homes and an intoxicated woman who’d fallen down an embankment near the pond along Mitchell Drive.
A second-generation mailman, Adams says it’s an easy job that anybody can do, as long as they love it.
“There’s no boss telling you what to do all day long,” he said. “If you do a good job, you’re set free to do your work.”
Adams said he’s also cherished “the privilege of becoming part of other people’s lives,” whether it’s chatting about vinyl records and hi-fi sound systems with a man who kept receiving thin square-shaped packages, talking movies with a man who kept receiving mail from the film industry, or leaving a note for a local Japanese-American woman in hopes of learning Japanese.
That woman, Akemi, agreed to give him Japanese lessons. She also married him, in a modest ceremony at Baldwin Park.
Adams said they have no plans to move away from St. Helena after he’s retired, but he’ll relish sleeping in past 5 a.m. and “having the ability to do whatever I want whenever I want.”
He’ll keep recording occasional episodes of his pop culture podcast, Gordcast (sample episode title: “Surfin’ Through the Mutant Graveyard”). He’ll figure out a way to stay in shape now that he’ll no longer be walking seven miles a day, as he has for the last 15 years.
But in the meantime there’s still a few months’ worth of mail to deliver, and Adams is focused on saying goodbye.
Unsurprisingly for a guy who’s been known to don a Planet of the Apes costume on Halloween and a Dickensian costume for Christmas, Adams isn’t going to retire quietly. During the week of Feb. 19-25 he’s returning to his days as a swing carrier, working each St. Helena route one last time. He anticipates lots of tears, mostly his own. He’ll also give a prize to the house with the best farewell decorations, so start brainstorming.
“It’s going to be emotional because I do love this job, and 34 years is a long time,” he said. “It’s just time to go.”
A brief history of American mail service
A brief history of American mail service
1639: Richard Fairbanks’ tavern is designated as the official repository for mail in the American colonies.
1710: The Queen Anne Act is passed
1765: The Stamp Act is passed
1775: William Goddard’s postal tenets are adopted by the Second Continental Congress
1780s & 1790s: More legislation is passed defining the U.S. Post Office Department
1802: A federal law is passed banning Black people from carrying mail for the Post Office Department
1835: The American Anti-Slavery Society uses a technicality to send pro-abolition materials as newspapers via the Post Office Department
1860-1861: The Pony Express is in operation
1863: The first Black employee of the Post Office Department is hired
1873: Censorship legislation commonly known as the Comstock Act is passed
1918: The Post Office Department begins airmail efforts
1960s: Mail backups are rampant across the U.S., causing the implementation of zip codes
1970: Post Office Department employees go on strike, resulting in the first postal unions and the reform of the Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service
2006: The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act is passed
2020: The U.S. Postal Service experiences extreme mail slowdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic
You can reach Jesse Duarte at 707-967-6803 or jduarte@sthelenastar.com.