Postal passing

Friday, Aug. 6, 1999 | 11:31 a.m.

It's 6 p.m. Monday in Goodsprings and the streets are empty.

The sun beats down. A rooster crows on occasion from someone's back yard. A car drives by. A dog naps in the middle of the road.

There is no grocery store in town. No restaurant. No gas station. No clinic.

On the corner of Main and Esmeralda, a TV set can be heard blaring from a nearby trailer.

At the community center, eight locals are dancing to the Village People's "YMCA" for their Monday aerobics class.

Across town 80-year-old William Russell, freshly shaved for the 7:30 p.m. monthly town meeting, watches a game show in the living room of his trailer.

Down the street, outside the home of 78-year-old Christina Stephens, a dog chases a cat. Inside, Stephens is gathering her notes for the meeting.

For days the residents of Goodsprings have been looking forward to this particular Citizen's Advisory Council meeting. The main agenda item: A possible solution to a problem that has plagued the town for the past week -- the removal of their post office.

"We've had a post office here for 101 years," said Stephens, who has lived in Goodsprings since 1938.

On July 28 the small cubicle in the old Community Club that had been serving as a post office was gutted of its postal boxes by order of the U.S. Postal Service. For years, a postal carrier had operated the cubicle for one hour a day, five days a week, selling stamps and stuffing the boxes.

The cubicle was doomed, however, when Postal Service officials finally ruled that it did not meet standards set by the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The ceiling is warped from a leak in the roof. Tile is missing on the floor. The wheelchair ramp is too steep, the outside steps are eroding and the safety gate is loose. The condition of the cubicle is reflective of the entire Community Club. Moving the cubicle into another part of the building was not an option.

"They think it's an accident waiting to happen," Ruth Rawlinson, chair of the Goodsprings Citizens Advisory Council, says as she pulls the loosened gate. "They're afraid they're going to get sued."

So residents were told in a letter from the Postal Service to pick up their mail seven miles away in Jean. The Postal Service also listed other options, which became the agenda items that drew Russell, Stephens and about 40 other Goodsprings residents to Monday's monthly meeting.

"I can walk to the post office but I can't walk to Jean," Stephens said.

About half of the residents in Goodsprings are senior citizens, Rawlinson said, with many living on just a few hundred dollars a month. She said the cost of driving to Jean is an issue for many.

But it's not just about getting the mail.

For many rural communities such as Goodsprings, where the population is under 200, the place where people pick up their mail serves as a meeting place, a community bulletin board and a sense of identity for the community.

So for the residents of this old mining town 35 miles southwest of Las Vegas and unseen from Interstate 15, losing the post office was a heartbreak.

"There was a certain bunch of us that went down there every day," Russell said. "We'd shoot the breeze for 20-30 minutes and hear the local news.

"Now I've been sitting here watching TV. That's really about all there is to do."

The saloon located on Nevada Highway 161 at the entrance to town collects the younger people, Russell said. The post office collects the older crowd.

A two-room schoolhouse, a new community center, a library trailer and a church are among the town's offerings. On the north edge of town the volunteer fire department has its firehouse. While they all add to Goodspring's quality of life, it was the little cubicle serving as a post office that became the daily social center.

Which is why, on a typically quiet Monday evening in town, there was a rustle in a few dozen houses as the townspeople prepared for the Citizens Advisory Council.

"Other things we probably wouldn't care about but this is a big deal," Russell said.

For most of the seniors it's the only exercise and socializing they get, Rawlinson said. Not only do people visit and talk at the post office, but they would walk past people's houses and talk, she added.

While many agreed the post office needed work, they felt slighted by the abruptness -- four day notice -- of the closure.

"If they would have told us that it needed more repairs we would have tried to fix it," Dora Loftis, 18-year resident of Goodsprings and president of the town's Community Club, said. "We furnish the building. If anything's wrong they tell us and we fix it."

The Community Club has been looked after by the Community Club members since the World War II Army barracks building was brought from Tonopah. Bake sales, raffles and donations covered the cost of the electric bill.

But letting the matter wait any longer would have been negligence by the postal service, said Frank Diggins, manager of operations for the United States Postal Service in Las Vegas. "Someone could have gotten hurt."

The meeting

"We'll try to keep it down to a low roar," Rawlinson said from a table in the front of the room.

Local postal manager Dee Dee Terrano placed overheads on a projection machine -- one overhead for each option.

The first option, bringing the present building up to code from a federal standpoint, was not plausible considering the lack of money in the community and was immediately dismissed.

Another option, dedicating space in the new community center, was also dismissed. The center, owned by Clark County, is shared with the school district and cannot be used otherwise during the day.

Outside of school hours the building is used for weddings, birthday parties, town meetings and town celebrations. Before folding chairs were set up for Monday's meeting it served a 5 p.m. karate class and 6 p.m. aerobics class.

"We fought too hard and long to get a decent space to hold town meetings and we're not about to give it up," Rawlinson said.

Another option: bring in a new, used trailer. But the postal service has no funds for that, Terrano said.

Other options would be cluster box units in eight locations around town or a contract postal unit run by someone who would take it on as a business venture.

"Cluster boxes would get busted into within a few days," murmured a woman from the audience.

Why the financial burden of maintaining a postal facility was up to the community stumped another who stood to make himself heard.

Others expressed frustration over not being able to use the portable postal facility sitting behind the post office in Jean.

The portable facility is for emergencies, explained Diggins from the back of the room.

"Our situation's an emergency if our roof is going to collapse," said Nancy Parker, citing a concern the postal service had about the leaky roof.

As debate on the options had moved from quiet attentiveness toward rumblings of discontent, Clark County Commissioner Erin Kenny stood up and abruptly stated she would see that the county provided a trailer for a nominal annual fee.

"There's no other way to handle it," she said.

The residents looked at one another, nodded their heads and shrugged their shoulders and motioned to consider that option.

"We're done," Terrano said.

A number of residents have offered to donate land for the trailer, Kenny said Thursday. Some are talking about placing the trailer where the Community Club sits.

Trailer or no trailer, however, some Goodsprings residents still feel slighted because they have no permanent post office.

"It may be temporary for 20 years, but it's still temporary," said Liz Warren, Goodsprings resident and council member.

But Diggins said post offices are built on need, growth rates and population. Postal facilities are more often placed in towns such as Logandale and Overton with populations exceeding 1,000, he said.

There are post offices in Nevada that are an hour's drive from anywhere, Diggins said. "It's not out of the ordinary for folks in Nevada to drive up to two hours for mail."

It was never the postal service's intent to keep the mail center in Jean, Diggins added, unless the residents opted for it.

"We understand that everybody's mail is very important to them -- especially in rural areas where they receive Social Security and medication," he said. "Their reaction was probably what was expected."

A history of struggle

Goodsprings originated just before the turn of the century as a mining area. There were mines in the mountains and people lived at the mines. A mill was created to service the mines. Postal service was available to the area as early as 1898, possibly earlier, Warren said.

The town's big boom came during World War I. At the time there were several businesses in the area. After the war the mining boom ended and Goodsprings became what it is today.

The old postal facility in the Community Club faces an old well house across the street. On another corner stands an old rock house, the first house in Goodsprings. Next to that sits an old mining house.

"The town is where it is because it had water and was built to service a particular need," Warren said. "When the need diminishes so does the town."

The struggle for postal service is one of a long list of struggles for residents of Goodsprings. They struggled for years to convince the telephone company that a call to Goodsprings wasn't long distance, that residents new to Goodsprings needed phone service.

It took them 15 years to get a park. It took great effort to get an ambulance and newer fire equipment, Rawlinson said. And recently they had to work with the school district to get a kindergarten teacher.

"All of these things we've had to fight for, to volunteer for, to bite and chew to keep," Warren said.

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