Day In and Day Out, They Delivery for You

Neither anthrax nor the New England winter can stop Sam McClary, who is not even wearing a jacket.

A gust of cold wind hits the Science Center mailroom supervisor in the face as he walks out of the building’s basement onto the loading dock to receive the daily Federal Express delivery.

“Oh Paul, that’s a big one. Can you give me a two-wheeler?” he bellows, beckoning for shy, bespectacled Arlington resident Paul Riley—another mail room worker—to bring him a dolly.

It’s 9:40 a.m. Tuesday morning and below freezing as the 61-year-old McClary, a Mattapan resident with a “Science Center” sweatshirt to match his gray hair, loads the 30-odd packages onto a dolly.

“I don’t wear a jacket so I won’t have to keep running to put it on when I go outside,” McClary says. “But I’m wearing a t-shirt and undershirt, so it’s not too bad,” he adds.

A shivering woman wearing a jacket, scarf and gloves walks by.

“We’re really hectic today,” he says as he hurriedly pushes the two-wheeler into the mailroom. Valentine’s Day is a week away, one of the mailroom workers is on vacation and the spring semester is just underway—making this week one of the busiest of the year.

As McClary records the arrival date of a package bound for the Harvard Foundation, a first-year with a buzzcut arrives at the mailroom window to ask for a package.

Johany Freitag, an effervescent mailroom worker from the Dominican Republic who sports black glasses and black hightop sneakers, begins chatting with Josue Guinart-Carrero ’05 in Spanish before walking to the back room where she finds the Math 21a textbook he ordered online.

“She feels like a friend of the family,” says Guinart-Carrero, whom Freitag also knows as box 1561. “It seems really natural talking to her.”

Mailroom workers have been befriending students for years.

“We had a girl two years ago who brought us all sweatshirts after Christmas break, we’ve had mothers who’ve sent us cookies and there was a girl who sent pistachio nuts from California,” McClary says.

Mailroom favors run in the other direction as well, adds Peter Romeo—a Cantabrigian clad in a purple shirt and black jeans who also works as a crossing-guard—as he sorts newly-received packages.

“I met some guy looking though the recycling bin. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was looking for a New Yorker [magazine]. We always get a few extra New Yorkers so I always make sure to stick an extra one in his box,” Romeo says.

“How Can You Not Know You Have a Mailbox?”

After Freitag finishes chatting with Guinart-Carrero about his intersession, she begins to insert invitations to the First-Year Formal into boxes 1200-1300.

She stops at box 1286, which is stuffed with a Wall Street Journal, a Leader-Courier and several envelopes.

“I know he’s getting another Wall Street Journal today,” she explains, filling out a yellow card asking Greg E. Cook ’05 to clear out his box. “It’s just too full,” she sighs.

Some first-years have never emptied their mailboxes.

“Last week someone came in and said, ‘I didn’t even know I had a mailbox,’” Romeo remembers. “How can you not know you have a mailbox? Maybe they’re just really into e-mail.”

Students aren’t the only ones who infrequently check their boxes.

“The only thing I don’t like to do is the proctors, because they never check their mail, so you have to ram your hand in,” says Riley.

The rough edges of each metallic box sometimes cause workers to nick and cut themselves when reaching into their dark and crowded interiors.

A bandage on Riley’s finger covers a cut he received while working last week.

“I’m a casualty of the mailroom,” he says.

Fortunately there were no casualties to the anthrax scare that struck the nation’s mailrooms four months ago—though workers wore gloves for two months.

Though he’s more susceptible to paper cuts now, Riley is glad the threat has passed.

“I just feel better manipulating the mail without gloves,” he says.

Gloves or not, Riley greatly prefers this job over his last one at the Cambridge Savings Bank, where he processed envelopes at a machine all day.

“There are so many things to do here—that’s one of the reasons I took this job,” he says.

As Riley takes the “Stockman-Urquidez” (boxes 2400-2499) stack of invitations to the Institute of Politics open house, McClary prepares to meet the UPS shipment.

He’s hoping to convince the UPS driver to bring several packages to Wadsworth House. The mailroom receives packages not only for students and proctors, but for the Science Center and all the buildings in Harvard Yard.

If McClary is successful, he will save University Mail Services from coming to pick up the large packages.

“It won’t be easy,” he says to Riley, bracing to meet the elements and the bigger challenge posed by the UPS driver.

“David, I need a favor today, is that possible?” he asks the brown-uniformed driver.

As he helps the UPS worker unload the 105 packages—many from online vendors like Barnes & Noble.com, Amazon.com and Books-A-Million—he asks the unresponsive driver over a dozen times if he will bring the packages to the Yard.

He also recalls the most interesting package he ever received: a full-sized harp in a wooden crate for a student in the orchestra.

“It’s almost on your way to Widener, David,” McClary pleads, before the UPS employee finally relents—much to McClary’s relief.

“That’s why I help him with the packages,” he laughs as he weaves through the 105 UPS parcels filling the loading dock platform.

McClary almost trips over a box of four folding chairs, then has a revelation.

“No, let me change the harp to hammock,” he declares. “We got it about two months ago.” He pauses. “It had to be assembled, though.”

Mailroom Magic

Back in the mailroom, the whirring of combination locks and the clicking of boxes opening and closing can be heard over the music of WMJX-Magic 106.7 emanating from a small radio. Disembodied hands seem to shoot in and out of the squares in the mailbox grid.

The students have arrived.

Most first-years drop by between classes, according to McClary, and a few minutes after noon the cacophony of voices can be heard through the wall of mailboxes.

“I can never get this to work,” a female first-year complains, as Freitag delivers a half-dozen issues of Esquire.

Though she succeeds in opening her postal vault, many don’t.

“In September, we get a lot of that, which is understandable,” Riley says. “But even to the very last day, we get people coming in who forgot their combination, forgot their box number or can’t open their box.”

As Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide” plays on the radio, a student asks if he needs to add another stamp to his oversized envelope.

Riley places it on a small digital scale as Freitag and McClary consult a chart.

“Two ounces? Oh, I’d put another stamp on there,” McClary tells the first-year.

Freitag walks to the table in the center of the front mailroom to sort Land’s End catalogues, passing the yellow paper blocking off box 1157, in the highest of 10 rows of boxes.

“She was about this tall,” McClary says of the first-year formerly known as box 1157, placing his flattened hang perpendicular to his sternum. “So we moved her to box 2745.”

McClary—a 40-year Harvard employee who worked as a physics lab technician before coming to the Science Center—is responsible for introducing others to the mailroom.

Around spring break, McClary starts recruiting students to help during the busiest mailroom time of the year: move-in week.

Last September 7313 packages arrived in the mailroom, 85 percent of which came during move-in week, according to the records from McClary’s makeshift file cabinet, a U.S. Postal Service plastic tub.

There are so many packages that they can’t fit in the mailroom and must be secured in chemistry labs on the first floor of the building

Jakub J. Kabala ’04, one of three undergraduates who worked in the mailroom last September, said the heavy flow of packages makes for strenuous work.

“Sometimes I’d be totally dripping with sweat and dirty from the boxes,” he recalls.

But he says McClary, Freitag, Romeo, Riley and Nassim Kerkache (who was on vacation this week) made the experience enjoyable.

For Rudi G. Patitucci ’04, the rewards were also pecuniary.

“I got a $100 tip from this guy whose daughter I helped move in,” Patitucci says. “She was on the fourth floor of Thayer and had 22 packages.”

At about 1 p.m., a man and woman walk into the mail room with 1630 copies of the booklet “Film Studies at Harvard 2002.”

Aretha Franklin begins singing “Rescue Me” on the radio as McClary jokes to his coworkers, “You all ready to come in at eight in the morning tomorrow?”

As the theme from Flashdance wafts through the mailroom, McClary says he’ll probably start thinking about retirement in a year—though he adds, “I’m the kind of person who needs to work.”

He heads into the mailroom, where Romeo is still sorting the packages. A DKNY shoebox tightly wrapped in tape and a box in teddy bear and candy cane wrapping sit on the right wall of shelves.

A small basket of flowers (“Oh, I better call her. Sometimes they wilt down here!” exclaims Romeo as he heads to the phone) and a carton of fresh pears from Oregon rest among the packages on the left wall of shelves.

Romeo moves deftly around a large box of Big Indian Natural Mountain Spring Water.

“That student orders his own beverages. Sometimes he orders juices, too. I really don’t know why he does that.”

Of the four workers, Romeo is the most philosophical about his job.

“Have you ever seen the movie The Postman with Kevin Costner? It gives you a sense of how mail connects society. Without it, you’d just have individual towns and people.” Romeo pauses as he places a FedEx package on the shelf and smiles wistfully. “It’s a good story.”

—Staff writer Amit R. Paley can be reached at paley@fas.harvard.edu.