If you have lived in East Hampton in the last 30 years, your mail may have been delivered by Larry McCue. But after a 55-year career and nearly one million miles driven for the United States Postal Service, he is hanging up his satchel and the keys to his truck and retiring.
Although he worked mostly in East Hampton, Mr. McCue said he has made “four trips to the moon and back” considering all the miles he has driven to deliver mail. In all those miles, he never had an accident or a flat tire and never took a sick day, he said.
But he was always the go-to guy when someone else had a flat.
Most recently, Mr. McCue worked Route 12 in East Hampton, the zone that covers the Main Street business district and the final route of the original 12 in the ZIP code when he moved to town in 1990. Since then, five more routes have been added as the town has grown.
But, he said, while the town has physically grown, the amount of mail has decreased over time. Thirty years ago, Mr. McCue said he would start his day at the old, much smaller post office with a mountain of mail to deliver. Measured by the foot, Mr. McCue said he would load his truck with 15 feet of mail — from letters to fliers to catalogs — a stack that would tower above him.
By the time he retired earlier this month, that stack had dwindled to four or five feet of mail every day.
When he first started delivering mail in 1972, “there were tons and tons of letters,” he said. “Back then it was 10 cents a letter. It didn’t matter if it came from Nome, Alaska, and was delivered in Florida.” Stamps now cost 87 cents and much of the mail we receive today comes electronically.
In 1990 the post office was still operating out of a 5,000-square-foot facility on Gay Lane. In 1992 it grew to 14,000 square feet. Mr. McCue said the construction project was done in stages, with pieces of the building opening and other parts closing, all while the crew there kept on working and delivering mail.
“It kept on growing and growing,” he said of the post office in those days.
He started his career in the town of Hempstead all those decades ago, working Route 11, known as the Heights.
“It was just a neighborhood of regular people,” he said. And he loved getting to know them and sometimes helping them out, painting one of his customer’s houses and helping another one shingle his roof. He did grocery shopping for others but always drew the line at buying cigarettes.
And while Mr. McCue may have delivered mail to his fair share of rich and famous people, the regular folks are the ones he connected with the most.
Mr. McCue said his decision to work for the postal service didn’t come out of nowhere. Both his father, George, and his uncle, Ralph, worked for the post office and had lifetime careers there. His uncle was his supervisor when he started, and set the standard high. When he was backing a truck into the office parking lot and took a turn a little too fast, his uncle, who spotted him, said he may have been his uncle but he was still his supervisor.
After marrying in 1983, he and his wife, Donna, lived in Manhattan but bought a house in Springs in 1986. Eventually, he transferred to East Hampton and the couple raised their two children here.
Upon arriving in East Hampton, he was assigned to the letter sorting machine with 17 other people. With the help of the machine, they sorted 14,000 pieces of mail an hour. But, the extreme workplace pressure on the operators of the equipment is widely cited by historians and former workers as a major contributing factor to severe workplace stress and a series of violent incidents in postal facilities during the 1980s, which popularized the phrase “going postal.”
Mr. McCue didn’t last long on that assignment, he said, and started working as a clerk in the office. Later, he was elected the shop steward, the office’s union representative.
When Mr. McCue found himself sick at the end of his career, it was the shop stewards and supervisors who came after him who had a chance to help him. Allen Stephens, his longtime supervisor, made arrangements for him to take time off before his ultimate retirement earlier this month, something Mr. McCue said he is grateful for.
While Mr. McCue continues to struggle with his health, he still reminisces with fondness about his days with the postal service and the people he met along the way. His stacks of awards and commendations are further proof of a job well done and a community well served.
