Working on the 'Mail Boat' Is Insane Summer Job for Quick Runners
Everyone has experienced a challenging summer job, right? It’s almost an American rite of passage.
As a teen, I worked on my family’s farm performing glamorous tasks such as cleaning stalls and weedwacking under endless lengths of fence. It was good, honest work, but by the time August rolled around, I was ready to hit the books once more.
However, I imagine that my work wasn’t anywhere near as challenging as that of the mail jumpers on Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva. And that job is exactly what it sounds like.
Most of us know the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service, which is engraved on the front of James Farley Post Office in New York: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
The homes around Lake Geneva once posed an even more fundamental issue for mail delivery than mere bad weather. In the opening years of the 20th century, the wealthy had flocked to the area to enjoy the waters in summertime, but there weren’t any roads.
Lake Geneva was a wilderness at that time, and how do you deliver mail to waterfront houses? You deliver it via boat and a handful of very fast post employees.
“It actually started in 1916, and in those days it was a necessity,” Captain Neill Frame, who keeps alive the tradition of delivery mail by boat on Lake Geneva, said. “This was a summer resort for the wealthy, and it was wilderness.”
The mail jumpers were the ones who actually made the hand off, sliding letters and packages into mailboxes. But you can’t just pull up to dock and stop when you want to drop off a piece of post.
Why? The wind and waves are a constant pressure. If the boat were to stop, it would get tossed every which way.
By remaining moving, “I can steer and effectively keep from hitting the pier,” Frame told WITI. “Even on a pretty rough day, I can keep off their pier.”
This is where the mail jumpers enter the picture. Because the mail boat can’t stop, the mail jumper have to move very, very quickly.
These employees — who are virtually always young students on summer break — heave themselves from the boat. They scramble down the pier, jam the mail into its box, whirl, and sprint toward their still-moving ride.
If they’re fast enough, they’ll make the leap back on the boat with no problems. If they aren’t, well, they may get more than a little wet.
“You have to be athletic,” said Katie Theisz, whose grandmother’s cousin was one of the first female mail jumpers. “You also really have to be gutsy.”
A mailboat jumper who WWSB only identified as Jessa said, “The advice I always say is run faster than you think you should be. Because you’ll be running and think you’ll make it back, and then you’ll turn around and the boat will be almost gone.”
Mail jumping may sound like a less-than-efficient way of delivering the post, but the people of Lake Geneva wouldn’t have it any other way. 2018 marks the 103rd delivery season.
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