By Alexander Dworkowitz
When Chuck Espinet started working at the Whitestone post office for the Christmas rush in 1966, he was supposed to stay for only two weeks.
But just before Espinet was set to leave, one of his colleagues was run over and killed by a car. Espinet, a Puerto Rican native, was kept on.
When talk of Espinet's transfer resumed, the Ladies Home Journal moved its printing operations to Whitestone, causing a flood of mail and allowing him to stay longer.
After the post office adjusted to the increase, the staff was hit with another shock: one of its employees was bitten by a poisonous spider and died, Espinet said.
Espinet took the open position and stayed on for good.
“I figure the chances of all that happening would be a million to one,” said Espinet, now 64, with a smile.
More than three decades later, Espinet is finally leaving the post office at 14-44 150th St.
Espinet worked his last morning at the station last Thursday, enjoying a cake as he said goodbye to colleagues who had stood beside him for decades and customers he had watched grow up.
“It's not really hitting me yet,” Espinet said shortly after finishing work, as he relaxed in his Bay Terrace apartment before flying off to Florida for vacation. “I'm going to miss the people of course. I was a little teary-eyed when I left.”
When Espinet first came to the post office, he was the first Hispanic to work there.
One of his co-workers derided Espinet because of his background.
“He didn't like me because I was Puerto Rican,” Espinet said. “He was always picking on me. He was a bigot.”
It was the very same man who died of the spider bite, Espinet said.
“It was a pretty ironic thing,” he said.
Espinet's decades at the post office have been characterized by a perverse luck. Not only was he slated to work there for only two weeks, but he had been in line for a job sorting mail. The odd circumstances that led to his remaining at the post office also enabled him to snare the coveted position of clerk after a short period of time.
“They would always say, 'Who do you know that lets you stay [up front]? How come you're not back with us?' And I would say, 'I have an angel,'” Espinet said.
“If you don't have contact with people and you're in the back room, you're like a machine,” he said. “When you're at the window, you're an individual.”
It is in his interaction with the customers that Espinet has shined, drawing praise from his colleagues.
“The management always put pressure on us to get people out of the lobby,” said Mike Kaplan, who worked alongside Espinet for 26 years. “Chuck had a different attitude. He took his time. If you loved stamps, he spent a half an hour telling you about the new issues.”
But sometimes Espinet's congeniality caused him problems.
Years ago, one young woman from a local company came to Espinet every morning to pick up her firm's mail.
The two often chatted and exchanged smiles, jokes about a relationship between them began to fly, and the woman's boyfriend became jealous, Espinet said.
One day Espinet found three men waiting for him outside work. The men chased him down the street, and Espinet had to duck into a house to escape, he said.
“The day after the girl came up to pick up her mail, and she was all black and blue,” Espinet said.
It was not Espinet's only brush with unsavory characters. He was also robbed at gunpoint inside the post office, but he was able to provide a description of the man detailed enough for police to post his sketch in post offices across the city, he said.
“I gave such a good description that the guy gave himself up six months later,” he said.
Espinet admitted his friendliness often left him with extra work and longer, sometimes frustrated, lines. But he had no regrets.
“If people know you are going to help them in any way possible, those people will come to you more and more and more, so you will have more work than you bargained for.” he said. “But that doesn't bother me at all.”
Reach reporter Alexander Dworkowitz by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 141.
