Star Routes Hauling the Mail to Remote Areas

The other day in a post I educated you in what a Star Route deliverer in the Postal Service is or maybe was.
In case you were not paying attention or sleeping, here is rough definition of a star route again: It is a private independent company transporting the mail to distribution points in remote rural areas, like small town post offices.
When I was a time keeper at the Parcel Post Annex in Atlanta I saw Star Route drivers often. They came every night to pick up their mail. Sometimes the mail was not ready and they would sit in the break room and watch TV and drink coffee until the mail was ready.

Sometimes they would just crawl in the back of their trucks and take a nap. They were paid for the job, not by the hour. And one time one didn’t wake up.

A supervisor came up to my counter and asked me to call an ambulance or police. He said a star route driver was curled up in the bed of his truck dead. It was a cold time of the year, just like now. I forgot if I called the police or an ambulance. The old driver had a natural death on his break, no fowl play.

Lot of the postal employees slipped away from work to take a look at him. I didn’t. I thought it was sad, turning a dead body into a side show for the curious. I was told that he looked quiet and peaceful, curled up in an embryo position.

Star Route haulers, as I mentioned, are independent companies. And what is the purpose of independent companies? To make money. To make a profit. That is their lively hood.

To keep the profits big enough they had to save money where they could. I think one of their big money saving systems was to pay their drivers as little as possible. They usually hired elderly retired looking men or men that looked like they had been in one bar-brawl too many; people more desperate for a job and willing to work for much less.

Through the years, being in the timekeeping office, when a star route driver had a problem, we time keepers were the first to know. Someone was there to answer the phone around the clock. I remember one time the Georgia State Patrol called us and said they just arrested the driver for drunk driving, and what did we want to do about his truck-load full of mail? And more than once the law called us informing us wrecks a star route driver was involved in and again, “what do you want to do with all this mail?”

I don’t know if star routes are still in existence or not. With super highways, there aren’t many, if any, remote rural areas… so, maybe their need just kind of faded away.