Letter Perfect

Forget the days of “neither rain nor snow” admiration. Like Rodney Dangerfield, postal carriers today get no respect, kicked around in countless jokes by late-night talk show hosts and maligned by that popular new slang term for homicidal madness, “going postal.”

But in the San Fernando Valley, the mail carriers are being praised as the most punctual in the state, and second best in the nation.

So says a survey by Price Waterhouse, the same folks trusted to conduct the secret tally of Oscar votes.

The Van Nuys district, which stretches from the San Fernando Valley to the Santa Clarita Valley and from Thousand Oaks to Burbank, scored a 94% on-time rate for the delivery of local overnight first-class mail during the busy winter mailing season, according to the recent survey of 83 areas around the nation.

Only Wichita, Kan., scored higher, with 96%.

What price punctuality?

“It’s really an attention to detail,” said Postal Service spokeswoman Terri Bouffiou. “Our motto is ‘every piece, every day.’ ”

The survey’s results have won the Van Nuys district a spot in the Postal Service’s exclusive 90/90 club, meaning the district scored better than 90% on both the Price Waterhouse survey and a separate survey of customer satisfaction.

The results have boosted the morale of local postal carriers, who hope this will dry up the river of insults.

“When I hear people making fun of us I know they have never carried mail before,” said postal carrier Mike Herrington while walking his route in Woodland Hills. “I know that once they have filled our shoes they’ll realize it’s not the kicked-back job they think it is.”

Indeed, each day more than 5 million pieces of mail filter through the Santa Clarita mail processing center, where they are sorted by ZIP code and community and then trucked to local post offices throughout the Valley. Nearly half a million pieces are delivered daily just to the post office on Clarendon Street in Woodland Hills.

When the mail arrives there, it is sorted again, first by postal clerks and then by letter carriers, who deftly sort it for their individual routes.

Then the honor of the Valley postal corps is up to such carriers as Herrington.

Once on his route, he quickly moves from house to house, sometimes cutting across lawns to save time--only where the residents appear not to mind, he says--but always finds a few moments to stop and exchange kind words with the friends he’s made.

“He’s the best mailman in town,” said Judith Sanford as he approached her driveway. “In fact if our mail is running late, we know he’s either on vacation or it’s his day off.”

So punctual is Herrington that as he walked his route Tuesday morning a woman driving a white convertible pulled up and jumped out to greet him with a hug. The woman, Teresa Beyer, who previously lived on Herrington’s route, said she was in the neighborhood running errands when she realized she knew exactly where to find Herrington on his route because his movements are so predictably punctual.

“Postal carriers like Mike don’t get the credit they deserve,” Beyer said. “People take what they do for granted and that’s a shame.”

But not everyone does. More than a few residents came out of their houses to chat with Herrington along his route. Others honked their horns as they drove by. And a couple who used to live on his route and moved to Hawaii still send him postcards inviting him to visit.

“I’m, like, the cool mailman,” Herrington said with a grin. “Everybody honks at me and even the kids run after me.”