Protest Lands at the Feet of the Ranch Postmaster

Some residents of Rancho Santa Fe have given a new meaning to the phrase “junk mail.”

They’ve been trashing the little Rancho Santa Fe post office with it. Throwing it on the floor, literally, in an act which Postmaster Joe Prentice equates to a Boston Tea Party type of protest.

The problem, Prentice says, is that Rancho Santa Fe residents get an incredible amount of bulk, unsolicited commercial mail. This is due to the bountiful demographics of Rancho Santa Fe, recently rated the eighth-wealthiest suburb in the United States. It seems that every pricey mail-order catalogue and teaser in the land has been computer-targeted for Rancho Santa Fe’s 92067 ZIP code.

On an average day, every postal customer gets 10 or more pieces of junk mail, Prentice said. There’s no home mail delivery in the Ranch, and everyone in town uses a post office box. The Postal Service has upgraded everyone to a larger box, gratis, to handle the volume.

It has been normal operating procedure for years for many residents to belly up to one of the tables in the post office, sort through the mail, sift the junk from the valuable stuff, and pitch the unwanted mailings in the trash can. Prentice estimates that 10 40-gallon trash cans were filling up daily, burdening the trash bin out back.

Recently, the post office added more parcel lockers to help reduce the length of the customer line. But, for space to handle the new lockers, Prentice got rid of the tables and trash cans.

A poor decision, he concedes now.

“A segment of our customers said, ‘Hey, we didn’t ask for this mail. We don’t want it, and we’re not taking it home.’ ”

The fact that there were no trash cans didn’t stop them from leaving the junk mail behind. “They were throwing the trash all over the place,” Prentice said. “They’re upset that they get so much mail that they don’t ask for. One gentleman threw his at my feet and said, ‘I didn’t ask for this. Here.’

“A lot of these people here are very successful, very active and self-made. If they don’t like something, they’ll stand up and fight. It’s the Boston Tea Party all over again. They’re not going to put up with it.”

So Prentice has brought back the trash cans.

The Premiere? It Stunk

If the reviews said the premiere stunk, no wonder. The players at The Theatre in Old Town wanted to stage “The Melinda and Steve Show” last Wednesday night but it was a washout, sort of.

A sewage line from a nearby public restroom backed up and, well, that was that. Costuming didn’t call for galoshes, so it was curtains for the night.

Two hundred patrons were given, uh, rain checks.

A different sewage backup wiped out a dance recital a couple of weeks earlier.

A theater employee said Monday that the problem has been cleared up, at least for now. “The problem is, we never know when to expect it,” she sighed.

Getting in the Last Word

It is routine to prepare your last will and testament before it’s too late, and more people these days are lining up their own funeral arrangements in advance.

If you live in Rancho Bernardo, you also can have your obituary written ahead of your death, too.

The service is offered by the Press Club of Rancho Bernardo, a group that includes some old-time reporters and editors who know the difficulty of writing informed and accurate obituaries on deadline.

“Sometimes, the only person who knows the date of when the deceased was president of whatever, or exactly what city he lived in back in Pennsylvania, was the person himself, and then it would be too late to ask him,” said Jim Hague, president of the Press Club and a former writer for the Associated Press and a former assistant city editor at the Washington Post.

Friends of the deceased often don’t have the specific information the writer needs and, though the family would have that data, interviewing them at the height of their grief is a task for which neither the writer nor the survivor has much enthusiasm.

So Press Club members are offering to write advance obits; the fee is a $15 donation to either the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Assn. or the Alzheimer’s Family Center.

If you don’t like the idea of being interviewed for a story that won’t be published in your lifetime, you can simply fill out a front-and-back questionnaire that gives you plenty of space for “hobbies,” “church-civic activities,” special memorial donation requests and, finally, who should be notified of your death, such as out-of-town newspapers or alumni bulletins.

The first person to take the Press Club up on its offer was 79-year-old Douglas McCoy. He said he didn’t find the task morbid or upsetting. “I’m happy,” he said, “that I’m still around to answer the questions.”