Delivering the mail for 60 years
Not many 75-year-olds would rise at the crack of dawn to get out of the house rain, hail or shine, but for Feilding man Gordon Macdonald it has been his life.
The Manawatu postie will next month celebrate 60 years of delivering mail to the letterboxes of Kiwis around the country.
When Macdonald began as a postmaster for the New Zealand Post Office in Ormondville, Southern Hawke’s Bay, the country’s population had just edged over 2 million, Sir Edmund Hillary was establishing Scott Base in Antarctica and singer Dave Dobbyn had just been born.
It was 1957 and Macdonald answered a call from the local postmaster, who offered him a gig. He was at home doing his schoolwork by correspondence and the opportunity to get out of the house and make a dollar, or a pound as it was in those days, was too good to refuse. ‘‘I said yes straight away,’’ Macdonald said.
It was the beginning of a career that has fulfilled him for six decades. He’s experienced from the beginning the ever-developing landscape of modern communications and the transition from telegrams and faxes to emails and Facebook.
When Macdonald started out, post offices were bustling, and staff connected phone calls through a manual exchange. It would take about an hour to phone someone in another town, he said.
It was longer for international calls. They had to be booked a week in advance. The internet made instant communication a reality – something that was a pipe dream for Macdonald 60 years ago.
‘‘The telegraph service was quite a big part of the post, but when faxes came in it virtually stopped telegrams, overnight. Although mail is dropping now, you’ve got more small parcels and things than ever before. I don’t think it will die.’’
After four years in Ormondville, Macdonald moved in 1961 to Napier, and he worked in post offices all over Hawke’s Bay.
He moved to Apiti after getting married in 1967 and was the last permanent post master at that office before he left for Palmerston North in 1971.
In 1992, Macdonald threw in the towel, retiring for good. Or so he thought.
That only lasted a couple of weeks and he returned as a casual delivery agent, a role he still does today.
He had only taken one sick day in the past 25 years. ‘‘Most of the work they wanted was first thing in the morning and I’ve never had a problem getting out of bed, so I was made for it,’’ Macdonald said.
When asked how much longer he had left, the answer was short. ‘‘I’ll keep going until I can’t.’’