Postal Chief Puts His Stamp on the Job

Postmaster General Anthony Frank gets a lot of mail in snow, rain, heat and gloom of night. That happens when you leave San Francisco and move to Washington. But some of his mail is delivered in even weirder conditions.

For instance, he has just received a post card from Elvis.

This did not surprise him much.

Frank knows that the post card, which had “Rock ‘n Roll Heaven” hand-printed across the top, was efficiently delivered through Wilmington, Del. He can tell by the postmark.

And lots of people, thousands of them, have been writing to Frank about Elvis. So, why not Elvis himself?

After all, Frank is the first postmaster general to seriously address and even favor the notion of putting the swivel-hipped rock ‘n’ roll king on a stamp.

In fact the colorful postmaster general--who has raised many eyebrows with a whole batch of unique proposals--said last week that not only will Elvis appear on a stamp, but that the decade-long campaign for the stamp waged by Elvis’ followers has prompted the Postal Service to draw up plans for a new, separate series of stamps memorializing great figures in American music.

‘Use the Leaner Me’

On his post card, Elvis writes that having an Elvis stamp is a great idea. (He used a Buffalo Bill Cody stamp to send this endorsement.) He promises to attend the dedication ceremony in “the blue suedes” and adds a “P.S.: Use the leaner me.”

The “leaner me” refers to a question in a speech Frank gave to a group of real estate appraisers in San Francisco. Frank addressed, among other issues, the various problems of the Elvis stamp: One being whether to depict the young, thin Elvis, or the bloated Elvis in his final years. Frank identified four distinct and vocal factions with differing views on the subject.

“I made those factions up,” the Hollywood High graduate admitted in a recent interview. “But I think it’s true, or at least it’s now true. I created them.

“I said there was a thin faction that wants early Elvis. And the faction who wants--I don’t know, what’s a polite term?--the heavier Elvis, the later Elvis, which I suggested might have to be on a somewhat larger stamp.

“And then there’s the National Enquirer faction, which says he’s not eligible for a stamp because he’s not dead.” People must be quite dead--10 years dead--to appear on a stamp.

“And then,” Frank continued, “there’s a serious faction that says that Elvis abused his body (with drugs) and we shouldn’t honor somebody that did that. Well, I think you can turn that around to say that people who loved him and enjoyed his music would still have him if he hadn’t done that.”

Anti-drug activists were joined by some traditional stamp-collectors gasping in horror at Frank’s endorsement. But the Elvis controversy represents just one instance of how Frank, since he began the job last March, has surprised the postal world with imaginative, if controversial, proposals to modernize the Service and improve its image.

Frank, 57, had a somewhat similar reputation in San Francisco, where in 16 years he transformed the $400-million Citizens Savings thrift into the prominent First Nationwide Bank, one of the nation’s largest savings institutions with assets of more than $16 billion. Described then as “the biggest iconoclast in the thrift industry,” operating in an “intuitive, seat-of-the-pants style,” Frank became the chairman of First Nationwide, prompting even a critic to admit, “he is brilliant, creative and far-sighted, no doubt about it.” Among his many innovations, Frank opened First Nationwide Bank convenience branches in 150 K mart stores.

‘You Have to Have Fun’

While other postmasters general have ignored the outcry for an Elvis stamp as the ridiculous rantings of a fringe cult, Frank said he supports the Elvis stamp “for a couple of reasons.

“One, it’s fun. And I think you have to have fun in this life. My second reason is, I want more publicity for the hobby of collecting stamps. I want new stamp collectors. I think that people who are interested in Elvis may not now be stamp collectors. I want colloquy. I want discussion. Lord knows we’ve had that.”

Frank, a Democrat, does not look like the nonconformist he apparently is. Conservative suits and neat, silver hair frame a face that is often laughing at some potentially serious matter.

Frank grew up in Southern California, and was educated at Dartmouth and the University of Vienna. His wife, Gay, leads adventure excursions, returning recently from Tibet to spend the traditional family summer at a rented house in Manhattan Beach. Their daughter, Tracy, and son, Randall, are grown, although “you could argue about that,” Frank said playfully.

When Frank’s San Francisco friend Robert Setrakian, a Postal Service governor, asked Frank last winter for a list of candidates for the postmaster general job, Frank surprised him by volunteering himself. In a candid moment at a social event, Frank said he decided he wanted the postmaster general’s job because he’d really made all the money he would ever want to spend and relished the huge managerial challenge of running the U.S Postal Service, the largest civilian employer in the world.

Fled Nazi Germany

In an interview, Frank emphasized his desire to perform public service for the country that has given a good life to him and his parents, who fled the Nazis in Germany in 1937 when he was 6 years old.

“It’s a chance to pay the country back, maybe, a little bit,” he said. “And I thought it would be fun.”

Besides the Elvis issue, Frank created an even bigger stir when he came up the idea of having Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, a computer systems expert, find ways to streamline operations and cut Postal Service costs in return for a share of the future savings his recommendations would create.

Members of Congress and business competitors of Perot’s cried foul because the contract was not bid out. The contract is now in suspension while being challenged in court. The incident was a textbook example of how bold business maneuvers that work in the private sector do not fly in Washington.

Despite the Perot debacle, Frank still displays a boyish enthusiasm for his own new ideas, as well as for the discoveries he makes every day about the Postal Service.

One new program--”just a tiny little project, but I’m excited about it”--will have the Post Office handing out forms to kids to help them write letters to their grandparents. Frank wants to use the post office change-of-address cards to aid in voter registration. He wants to do another nationwide mailer, similar to the AIDS brochure, on drug abuse, water conservation or some other subject. And a few weeks ago in Seattle he unveiled a project combining automatic bank teller machines with stamp machines.

Another New Scheme

While discussing Elvis and whether or not he’s really dead (Frank believes he is), and the rule about having to be dead 10 years to be on a stamp, Frank leaped to another new scheme of his.

“Just for fun, speaking of dead 10 years, I have a real problem with Irving Berlin,” Frank said. “Irving Berlin is 100 years old, he deeply deserves to be honored, and yet, obviously he made a miscalculation 10 years ago and kept on living. So I’ve got a dual problem. I’ve got somebody who’s dead who’s alleged to be alive and I’ve got somebody alive that I want to honor who’s not dead.”

To solve the Berlin half of this dilemma, Frank is going to salute the composer of “White Christmas” on a secular Christmas stamp. The only problem is, the stamp can’t bear the word Christmas, because that would conflict with the yearly religious stamp, and the stamp can’t have Berlin’s name or face on it because he is alive. So Frank is going to have the stamp show “a house in the snow with trees and smoke and so on and we hope it gets through to people that this is ‘White Christmas.’ ” To help people get the idea, “I’ll be dedicating the stamp in--are you ready?--Berlin, New Hampshire.” Frank laughed at this, as he does at many of his adventures. “Well,” he added, “it’s a reach.”

A Large Operation

Telling some acquaintances at a dinner how he acclimated himself to his new job, Frank related the story of how he looked over the list of postal employees and couldn’t believe the breadth and scope of the 757,000-person, $35-billion-a-year operation.

“Five hundred nurses? “ he said in disbelief. “Don’t tell me--do we have doctors, too?” Indeed they do, about 100 of them. Lawyers and economists, too.

Crisscrossing the country to talk to these letter carriers, supervisors and other postal employees (he shook hands with 2,000 at one reception), Frank cheerfully advises they do things like “smile at someone who doesn’t deserve it,” and let a customer in who has arrived just a minute or two after closing.

He makes it clear to employees that he wants improvement, “a day’s work for a day’s pay,” but he is also perhaps the fiercest defender they’ve ever had. At a conference on privatization, sponsored by the conservative Cato Institute, Frank was appalled as he listened to what he described as “an orgy of postal bashing. I couldn’t believe people were saying these things about what is demonstrably the best postal system in the world.

“So I got up and said I had never heard so many half truths, derision and sarcasm in all my life. I said, ‘OK, this is my first speech. It’s been written for me and I have a real problem. The first sentence isn’t true. The first sentence says, ‘I’m glad to be here.’ ”

Boosting Morale

Frank, the fourth postmaster general in four years, has boosted employee morale by promising to stay on the job for at least three years. He wants more open houses in postal facilities and public service advertisements that explain the difficult jobs his people do, and how well and inexpensively they do them compared to their counterparts around the world.

“They work, all jokes aside, in rain or gloom or dead of night, all kinds of weather, and 3,000 of them get bitten by dogs a year,” said Frank, who’s not sure the bad image can ever be completely turned around. “When an important letter is late it drives out all thought of thousands of letters that came on time,” he said. “When you handle 500 million pieces of mail a day, can you avoid making a mistake? I don’t think so.

“But just think! If we’re only 99% right that will be 5 million mistakes a day! And in point of fact, our statistics show that we lose about 200 letters a day out of 500 million. It really is unbelievable.”

Frank has bristled when he has read some accounts that say he is “rescuing” the Post Office.

“The Post Office doesn’t need rescuing. It doesn’t need me,” Frank said. “I think the Post Office is pretty good. I just don’t happen to think that pretty good is what you want on your epitaph. I think we can do better.”