By Jill Fennema

At the end of December, three long-time postal workers retired from the Edgerton Post Office. Wanda Landhuis, Wendy Evink, and Rod De Kam all turned in their keys and ushered in retirement on December 31, 2020.

Wanda joined the postal work force in August 1986. She worked for 12 years in Leota as a substitute for the postmaster. Typically, she worked mornings, sorting mail and helping customers. When the postmaster was gone, she would work all day.

Wanda was hired by Arnie Gunnink, who was the postmaster at that time.

Back then, the post office was attached to Steve’s Service. Prior to her being hired, Arnie’s substitute clerk was his wife, which didn’t work very well when they wanted to go away. So Wanda was hired to help out and be the substitute as necessary.

When she first started, there was no test to be a substitute worker, but there was a test if you wanted to be a clerk or be a route driver. Wanda simply had to have a physical to prove that she could lift 70 pounds.

As “postmaster relief” in Leota, she was also called upon to work in many other post offices. She could not work as a clerk in the larger offices – like Pipestone or Luverne, because she did not have training on the machines, which were not computerized at the time.

In 1998, she started working full time in the Edgerton Post Office. Her title at the Edgerton office was part-time, flexible clerk. Once she started in Edgerton she could still go back to Leota to help. She also helped in other places, especially in Luverne, where she became familiar with the office and the way things worked there.

When Wanda was hired in Edgerton, Bill Paulsen was the postmaster.

Her day would begin about 7 a.m., with the first order of business being to open up the machine – or the till. Once the mail arrived, she would sort the mail. Her job was to sort the mail into three spots – Rural Route 1, Rural Route 2, or the post office boxes. After the mail was sorted, her job was to wait on customers throughout the day and file reports.

One thing that the United States government is fond of, is paperwork, and the United States Postal Service is no exception. The volume of paperwork has increased over the years.

These days, everyone wants to be able to track their packages, so that means that postal workers have to scan packages that enter and leave the post office. If a worker fails to scan something, their error will show up by the end of the day and someone will be sending them a message saying they made a mistake. There are also many reports to file each day.

Online shopping has increased the work for postal workers. The Edgerton office gets two Amazon deliveries on Monday and one on each of the other days. UPS also drops off some packages. The Edgerton office averages 175 to 250 packages per day. At Christmas, there were days where they had 350 packages.

The number of boxes and packages that need to be delivered has also increases with COVID-19, because more people are buying online rather than going shopping in person.

“We get calls all the time,” Wanda said. “It’s supposed to be there today, has it arrived?”

“It used to be that first class letters were the biggest part of the job,” Wanda said. “Now it’s packages. People email and text. They don’t write letters to each other.”

Once all the packages are sorted, it’s time for the route drivers to deliver. There are two rural routes in Edgerton. Rod De Kam has been the route driver for Rural Route 2 for the past 20 years and Wendy Evink has been the route driver for Rural Route 1 for 22 years.

Wendy started at the Edgerton Post Office on August 17, 1985. She started as a substitute driver for Jed Den Ouden, who was also a postmaster in the late 1960’s.

She drove the route on Mondays, while Jed drove it Tuesday through Saturday. This route has about 400 stops, about 100 stops more than RR2. Which meant that Jed was entitled to one day off per week. She worked his Monday route and then also worked as a “casual clerk” for six months out of the year. Regulations said she could not work the casual clerk position year-round.

During those six months, she would drive her route on Mondays and then work in the office under Postmaster Dan Schnyders. She would come in at 6:30 a.m. and sort mail through Dan’s coffee break. She would drive her route on Mondays and go home the other days. Then at 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. she would come back in and work as clerk.

During those years, she also would work as a substitute for Elsie Ver Hey, who was the driver for RR2 at that time. Back then, a worker could be both a clerk and a route driver, but that is no longer the case. Most postal jobs are unionized, although all workers have the option of opting out of union membership.

In November 1998, she started as the full time RR1 driver. She had to take a test to become a carrier. She remembers that for part of the test, she had to look at a list of addresses and then had to recall which column the address was in. The other part of the test involved math and knowing postal zones.