Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 9, 1993 TAG: 9309090175
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
Anyone else who yearns to buy Elvis stamp key rings, postal coffee mugs, T-shirts and puzzles, a snow blower, water fountains, adding machines, lawn mowers or artificial shrubbery might want to make the event part of his or her appointed rounds.
From basements or attics at post offices throughout the region, gift curios, collectibles and antiquated or surplus equipment has been brought - special delivery - to the former Heck's store in Christiansburg.
It's all up for sale beginning Friday, and some of the items are so quirky that the highest bidder may be the only bidder.
Others may create more of a clamor.
"Sold everything I had" earlier this year in Charles Town, W.Va., said Gary Cooper, wiping a handkerchief across his brow. "I don't know what it will be like around here." The event will be the first of its kind hereabouts. Christiansburg was selected as the site because it's accessible from major roads and centrally located in his Appalachian district, said Cooper, who is a regional property manager for the postal service.
The old store on Roanoke Street was selected because it is vacant and roomy enough for the truckloads of surplus Cooper retrieved from about 85 post offices.
After spending several hot, late-summer days picking up the equipment and delivering it to the empty store, Cooper said the postmasters were happy to see him.
"They asked me to clean their offices up, and that's what I'm doing. They've got new equipment and didn't have a place to work."
The surplus desks, chairs and cabinets are sturdy items made of dusty wood or drab-colored metal - and Cooper doesn't want to move them again.
So he hopes all goes well, or at least goes. "I'm not going to haul it back," he vowed.
First to go on Friday between 1-6 p.m. will be the retail items, which are numerous and various enough to fill a respectable flea market.
There are thousands of stamp pins, T-shirts, puzzles, mugs, note cards and tote bags, all emblazoned with some kind of postal logo. And they're all being sold at an 80 percent discount.
All the gift items are available for sale because the post office is leaving the frivolous merchandising business and getting back to basics.
Doors open again Saturday at 9 a.m. for pre-auction inspection. The sizable event begins at 11 a.m., and all the surplus Cooper and his hand truck have neatly arranged in the forlorn store will go.
As Cooper hauled, stacked and sweated, Kenny Graham, Radford's postmaster, strolled along the aisles of material, gazing nostalgically about as if he were in the Smithsonian instead of examining what some folks might charitably call junk.
"It's like a time machine," Graham said. "A lot of this stuff I haven't seen for years."
Graham said the mail sacks, pigeon-hole shelves and ornate letter boxes recalled the days when he worked in the Blacksburg post office. "Back when we used to do VPI mail by hand."
Cooper said it's not unusual for veteran postal employees to attend the auctions and participate in the bidding, mostly out of nostalgia. "They want a small piece" - an old leather mail carrier's pouch, for example.
The public's interest is often drawn at postal auctions to the ornate metal letter-box doors, Cooper said, with their stamped or raised box numbers, dial locks and engraved American eagles.
People like to collect them or use them for handmade jewelry or knickknack boxes. So Cooper and auctioneer Danny Wooften were painstakingly removing the little doors from larger panels of letter boxes.
Nowadays you can't peer with anticipation through the little window in the letter box to see what awaits - a letter from your sweetheart, your paycheck, a tax refund, greeting from your draft board - before you open it up. Modern-day postal boxes are cold, solid metal that offer not a hint of what's within.
Likewise, part of the surplus to be auctioned are enormous pigeon-hole shelves - many still with the postal customers' names scrawled above - which were used in the days when everybody had his or her own niche.
There's one heavy wooden cabinet that must have stood in a post office near Lynchburg for years. You can read the quaint names of the little towns nearby, each with its own slot:
Hurt, Goode, Gladys, Clover, Java, Bracey, Big Island, Coleman Falls, Republican Grove, Clifford.
Those RFD days are just as out-of-date as most of the cabinets. But the old pieces might make fine spice racks or cubicles for nuts and bolts.
Automation is the reason much of the equipment is being put out to pasture. "We've set up a lot of computers, so I ran out of room," Graham said. "We have to be competitive, and it's the only way now."
There are fragments of change all over the room. An unattached metal placard dated 1957 (Dwight D. Eisenhower - President) which evidently outlived its own post office. Big wooden lobby desks with holes for inkwells. Even surplus computer equipment, already obsolete.
"I hope it will be put to good use," Graham said. "I hate to see anything go to waste."
Proceeds from the sale will benefit the Uncle Sam Fund, otherwise known as the federal budget.
by CNB