Norfolk postal worker pulls final shift after 42 years

It's early Friday morning, and Hervey Trimyer is making his last drive to the post office.

No, he's not switching to paying his bills online. "No!" Trimyer says. "I'm a company man."

Truly, Trimyer will likely drive to a post office again, but this morning's drive would be his last as a U.S. Postal Service employee - his last workday of a 42-year career.

For much of that span, "neither snow nor rain nor" anything else could keep Trimyer away from his series of postal service jobs. He's built up more than 4,000 hours of unused sick pay. The last time he called in sick was "sometime in the '70s," he says.

As he drove through Norfolk on his way to the Janaf postal facility, Trimyer ran down how he got into the postal service. When he got out of the Army, he went to Old Dominion University and worked over the Christmas season for the post office - he made enough in those few weeks to pay for tuition and books for the year.

Upon graduating, Smithfield Packing Co. offered him a job in its finance department, but that seemed like a long drive for a man who had only left Norfolk - ever - when he was in the Army. "Lived in the same ZIP code my whole life," Trimyer says. He applied to the postal service and was offered a job within a week.

He started as a distribution clerk, sorting mail for the carriers, then moved into accounting, data systems and auditing. Around 1990, he took on the job that to this day makes him a well-known name and face to thousands of Hampton Roads residents. He became a customer relations coordinator.

He determined that it would be an interesting job by three phone calls he answered his first week:

Call one: "Why is my letter carrier always African American?"

Call two: "Why are the clerks at the post office always white?"

Call three: "I am a lieutenant colonel. I just moved to this area, and I am supposed to be undercover, so why am I receiving mail?"

Another time, a customer opened a post office box at DeBree Station and wanted to make it clear he didn't want any mail put in it.

Trimyer smiled. "That's kind of a red flag."

Postal inspectors quickly learned that the man was using the post office box - very briefly - to drop off drugs for someone.

Trimyer pulls behind the Janaf shopping center and enters the mail facility through the back. "This is called the Thomas Corner Station," he says. "23502 is the ZIP code."

He gets those phone calls, too, at night, at home. "What's the ZIP code of...?"

Just last night, he got a phone message from a woman whose husband had accidentally mailed 30 deposit checks for a neighborhood pool - in unaddressed envelopes. Trimyer, the night before his last day of work, placed a call to the sorting facility at 11, then followed up with a phone call to the woman in the morning.

But the part of his job that has made him so well known does not involve human foibles. When he got the customer service job, he made it his mission to "take the post office to the public."

Sitting in his office, he pulls out a Florsheim shoe box with more than 150 hand-stamped envelopes. They are called "special cancellations," commemorating landmark events such as ship commissionings, and though Trimyer can't be certain, he thinks he has conducted more special cancellations than anyone in the country.

The woman whose husband accidentally mailed the unaddressed envelopes? She met him on June 15, 1996, at a special cancellation event for breast cancer awareness. Trimyer knows this, because that's what the stamp on the envelope in the box says.

He's done them for the Children's Festival in Portsmouth, for Chesapeake Civil War Day, Afr'am Fest, for holiday traditions at Norfolk Botanical Garden, the commissioning of the Harry S. Truman, the decommissioning of the Nassau, the Rotary Club's 75th anniversary, the Tour de Cure diabetes ride. On April 22, 1997, Earth Day, he did one for the city of Norfolk's "Clean Your Files Day."

"You can't get these through email!" Trimyer says.

Speaking of which, a man of such staunch loyalty to stamps and envelopes ought to stare down a few tough questions, even if online banking is clearly out.

Have you ever "FedEx-ed" a package?

"No! Our service is better."

If you have a party, do you send "e-vites"?

"No."

Do you hate UPS?

"No, UPS uses the postal service to deliver some of their items the so-called 'last mile.' "

OK, OK, do you electronically file your taxes?

"No, well, I was mailing them until last year, but our tax preparer, she does. She says the IRS wants everyone to file electronically."

Oh, we got him there.

"So, she files them, then she gives me an envelope - and I mail them a check."