HITTING THE ROAD WITH A CHRISTMAS CARD

Perhaps you are one of the millions of Americans who this weekend will tackle the jolly task of addressing Christmas cards. But if you think you have a chore ahead of you, consider that of the U.S. Postal Service. On an average day, it processes more than 525 million pieces of mail--a figure that almost doubles during the holidays.

And consider the plight of each individual Christmas card. Ever wonder what, exactly, that 25-cent stamp buys you--and how many hands a letter must go through to get from here to there?

A reporter and a photographer decided to find out. They arranged for a San Clemente woman to mail a Christmas card to a home in Los Alamitos, then they followed it on its voyage through the postal system. By the time it reached its destination, the little wayfarer had endured layovers at four terminals, thumbed a ride on five different vehicles and communed with six machines.

And it was only going from one tip of Orange County to the other.

Postal carrier Carl Grimes has driven these parts long enough to watch his customers’ pediatrician bills become college bills, and “Nixon in ‘72” pamphlets become “Bush in ‘88” brochures.

For that matter, he was treading Route 16 back when it included San Clemente’s resident President. “I was Nixon’s mailman,” he says with understated pride. “He got thousands of letters every day. Every piece had to be X-rayed.”

But at 2:40 on this particular afternoon, a housewife rather than a president is Grimes’ star customer. Standing in front of her house, 400 yards north of the San Diego County line, Sandy Lammert passes a Christmas card to its first link in a chain of human and mechanical relay runners.

“I’ve never gotten so much attention before for just mailing a letter,” she says, laughing, as a small audience witnesses the transaction. The timetable from then on:

3:05 p.m. Grimes arrives at the San Clemente Post Office on Avenida Pico, empties his bulging sack of mail into a bin, and heads for the time clock to punch out for the day.

Though his daily routine no longer sports the excitement of rubbing elbows with a famous statesman, Grimes still considers his 21-year job as a carrier “outstanding.”

“I was stuck behind a desk for five years in the Marine Corps, and I’d go nuts doing that all the time,” he says. “I’d rather be outside. You’re more or less your own boss once you get out on the street.”

But during the holidays, things get very hectic.

“At Christmas, the stress and fatigue start setting in,” he admits. “But Christmastime is a lot of fun, too--especially when you deliver a parcel to children from Grandma and Granddad. It makes you feel good to see their faces light up.”

The San Clemente Post Office alone collects 160,000 letters a day--260,000 at this time of year. It employs 80 carriers, who cover 51 routes and 24,000 stops.

South Orange County tunnels through an extraordinarily ponderous volume of mail year-round, noted San Clemente Postmaster Jaime Chacon.

“Customers in affluent areas receive more oversized mail--advertisements, magazines, catalogues,” he says. “We’re getting concerned that the mailboxes won’t hold all the mail. I don’t know of any other area of the country that has this problem to the extent that we do. It’s a South Orange County phenomenon.”

4 p.m. Our Christmas card and 260,000 travel mates are loaded onto a truck and chauffeured up the freeway to the Santa Ana General Mail Facility.

Eighty percent of all mail that originates in Orange County makes a pit stop in Santa Ana, the consolidation point for 58 post offices and branches. Four football fields would fit inside the sprawling facility, which bustles with both high technology and--when artificial intelligence fails--good old manual labor.

The Santa Ana Field Division processes 5 million pieces of mail a day--twice that number in the pre-Christmas rush. It serves 762 square miles and 1,975,000 people at 840,009 addresses, divided among 1,716 delivery routes.

4:45 p.m. The card and all its fellow San Clemente natives are unloaded from the truck into a hamper and then rolled inside the gigantic barn to join thousands of other white envelopes.

“First, the mail is dumped from the hamper onto this conveyor belt,” says facility supervisor Ernie Dinella. “It goes up an incline, which spreads it out so it doesn’t come through in one big bunch.”

Uphill, then downhill, like a roller coaster; a waterfall of letters cascades onto a flat conveyor belt.

“Here, we try to weed out the unmanageable mail--the chunky mail, the mail in bundles. And stuff like this”--Denilla stops in mid-sentence, nabs an empty Cheetos bag and throws it into a trash can.

Two people stand along the level section of the conveyor belt, sifting out bulky mail that would jam the canceling machine. They coolly toss their finds into various bins--packages over here, fat letters way over there.

“You have to be a good aim,” says mail handler Baltazar Ramirez.

4:50 p.m. At the end of the conveyor belt, the mail must yet again pass muster--this time underneath a large roller that traps cumbersome pieces. Such mail is then carted off to be canceled by hand.

Denilla pulls an anonymous envelope from the conveyor belt to single it out as an example of virtue. “This is clean, plain mail, real nice. It goes right through the machines,” he says with fondness.

What constitutes “clean mail”?

For one thing, it comes packed in a white or beige envelope. “The stamp-canceling machine sometimes rejects colored envelopes because it can’t always distinguish the stamp from the colored ink,” says Postal Service spokesman Joseph Breckenridge.

A sturdy envelope, instead of the flimsy piece of folded paper that advertisers often use, will slide through the machines without wadding up and jamming them. Flat, normal-size envelopes will avoid being rejected right off the bat on the very first conveyor belt.

And typewritten envelopes will fly through the address-reading machine and the stamp-canceler.

Any rejection that forces a letter off the most efficient--i.e., most mechanized--route can cause a delay in its delivery. Luckily, our hotly pursued Christmas card met all fast-mail criteria but one--it was addressed the old-fashioned, personal way: by hand.

5 p.m. The relatively clean Christmas card should be whizzing through the Facer/Canceler Machine. A steady stream of envelopes, 30,000 per hour, feed into the machine.

In a blur of speed, the machine stands mail on edge, scans each envelope for a stamp, cancels the stamp with the day’s date, rejects letters on which it cannot find a stamp, and sorts all other letters into their four possible orientations: right-side-up, with the stamp in the top right corner; upside down, with the stamp in the lower left corner; backwards and right-side-up; backwards and upside-down.

Yes, all that at a rate of nine per second.

“An electronic eye looks for a certain frequency of fluorescents in the stamps’ dye,” Breckenridge says, explaining the stamp-reading aspect of the machine.

Limp mail frequently gets caught in the machine, requiring an overseer’s intervention. You probably have received a crumpled or torn letter repackaged inside a plastic baggie; it likely was a victim of the machine age. A cadre of postal workers sits at a table near the canceling machine, piecing back together mangled mail and sealing it in those plastic containers.

5:16 p.m. Although nobody can see the Christmas card anymore, it should have landed in a tray of letters all facing the same direction, poised for the next stage of its journey. The trays, as they fill up, are carried to the Optical Character Reader--or the OCR, in post office-ese.

Here, the cursive-inscribed card would suffer rejection.

“The OCR reads a letter’s ZIP code, city and state, and if they match up correctly, sorts it into drawers for the various locales,” Dinella says.

Working at the canceling machine’s pace of 30,000 letters per hour, the OCR slaps a bar code on letters that make the grade--readying them for further computerized sorters. “It’s possible for an envelope to make it all the way from carrier to carrier without being read by human eyes,” Dinella observes.

But the OCR is not yet sophisticated enough to read handwriting. “It sometimes can read neat print,” Dinella asserts, pointing out a hand-addressed envelope that had been filtered into an OCR drawer labeled “Denver, Colorado.”

Uh, this letter is supposed to go to Georgia.

“Oh. Scratch that,” says Dinella, rescuing the misdirected letter from a circuitous trip. Since the Christmas card did not wear a typewritten or neatly printed address, the OCR immediately spit it into the reject drawer without attempting translation.

“We rerun the rejected letters through the Big Green Monster, and get them on their speedy way,” Dinella says.

The Big Green Monster, whose official name is the Letter Sorting Machine--or LSM in post office-ese--relies on the human touch. Twelve people sit in a row along the massive machine while letters, one per second, shoot in front of their keyboards. The fast-fingered workers type each passing ZIP code on their keyboards, a procedure that whisks the letter off to its appropriate drawer.

6 p.m. No sign of the Christmas card. Forty-five minutes go by. Nothing. An hour. The watchers start to sweat.

7 p.m. Lo and behold, the Christmas card materializes, right in the drawer where it belongs, marked “Los Alamitos.” There is an audible sigh of relief.

“You see? The system works! It works!” cheers spokesman Breckenridge, who has been tagging along on the Christmas card journey.

Actually, he didn’t need to worry. The system usually works.

Less than one-tenth of 1% of the 160.4 billion pieces of mail processed in 1988 by the Postal Service was lost in transit.

Despite its rather amazing success rate, the Postal Service remains one of those beleaguered institutions that Americans love to hate.

“Even a tiny fraction of 160 billion makes for a lot of people with a story to tell at a cocktail party,” Breckenridge reasons.

On a large cart stuffed with crates of mail, the Christmas card patiently waited for the next leg in its relay race.

9:45 p.m. Truck driver Phillip Parham wheels the cart out to the loading dock--which resembles a train station, with platform after platform announcing destination and time of departure.

For a man who had been at it since three that afternoon, Parham was mighty energetic.

“This is a great job,” the amiable fellow said enthusiastically. “I’ve got friends at every post office. Sometimes I go to work mad at the world, and then I make a new friend and it’s a whole new ballgame.”

Back up the San Diego Freeway goes the Christmas card. It will spend the night out of the county, at the Long Beach General Mail Facility--where most North Orange County-aimed mail congregates for further codification.

10:40 p.m. Once again, the card meets up with a Big Green Monster/LSM--this one a bit more discriminating. The dozen keyboard-punching sorters now read the street numbers rather than the ZIP codes and--in the instant that it would take most of us to recall our own addresses--direct each envelope to its route.

Sorter Lucille Hernandez specializes in Los Alamitos. “I’ve memorized this entire scheme,” she said, indicating a large street map partitioned into the city’s 30 routes. “Learning a scheme is like learning a foreign language.”

In one fell swallow, the Big Green Monster eats the little white envelope, then spits it into the right drawer--Route 21.

12:45 a.m. All is well. The world-weary card will sleep, undisturbed, in its crate until dawn.

6 a.m. Wake-up call. The card is loaded onto a Los Alamitos-bound truck.

6:25 a.m. As the sun comes up, the card loops south a jot down the San Diego Freeway, back over the Orange County border, and pulls into the Los Alamitos Post Office.

6:55 a.m. The place is buzzing with the chatter and laughter of a new day. Los Alamitos’ 30 mail carriers are clocking in--among them Doris Luth, commander of Route 21.

The spunky young woman was a bundle of smiles and vigor at an hour most Southern Californians were dragging out of bed. And her gusto would not be wasted; Luth had just stepped into a long morning of nonstop motion. First duty: sort the ample stack of mail that awaited her.

“I don’t look at the addresses--I just look at the names,” she said, slipping letters into slots with the brisk skill of a Las Vegas card dealer. “I’ve been on this route for five years, so I know all my customers. But the names change often because I have a lot of apartments on my route, and renters tend to move around.”

That’s 381 residences and 75 businesses Luth knows by heart.

7:40 a.m. Luth spots the Christmas card and flicks it into its assigned slot. All systems go.

Luth could tell you a thing or two about her customers, just by the mail they receive. “You know where they shop, what doctors and clinics they go to, whether they’re on Social Security,” she says.

“I also know when it’s people’s birthdays and anniversaries because they get a lot of cards. And I learn about the sad occasions, too. One woman got a lot of cards and I asked, ‘Is today your birthday?’ She said, ‘No, my son died.’ That made me feel awful.”

On this morning, however, the occasion for cards was a merry one.

“I love looking at all the pretty envelopes at Christmastime,” Luth says. “Some cards are just addressed, ‘Grandmom, Such-and-Such Street, Los Alamitos’--no name, no street number, no ZIP code. So I have to figure out which person on that street is a grandmom.”

9:45 a.m. Luth takes to the road, her mail stacked in the order that it will be delivered.

10:30 a.m. Luth is pushing a cart down Green Avenue, about three blocks south of the Los Angeles County line and 40 miles north of the Christmas card’s originating point.

Eula Belle Gabaston could hear Luth coming up her gravel driveway. “Hello, Doris!” she chirped from behind her front gate. Luth fished through her cart and unearthed Gabaston’s mail: a few bills, a few flyers and . . .

The Christmas card.

Joy to the world.