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June 30, 2009

Problems Licked: You can mail letters and buy stamps again in 12 Points

It is official: Neither rain, snow, sleet nor a surety bond will keep the United States contract postal unit in 12 Points from making its appointed rounds — or, rather, opening its doors.

After nearly a month in limbo lockdown, the postal substation in Cecil Tilford’s Variety Store at 1279 Lafayette Ave. is back in business. The hours are as before:

Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. until last pickup at 4:15 p.m.

Saturday, 9 a.m. to noon.

Mr. Tilford’s elusive insurance surety bond — required by the postal service of all CPUs, but long overlooked in Mr. T’s little corner of the vast U.S. Postal Service — was approved Friday by a firm in Colorado. Word came late that day via fax and phone calls: At 9 a.m. on Monday he could unseal the packet of stamps, money orders and other trappings of CPU operations that had been bound like a mummy since June 1 in the variety store safe.

Monday afternoon, USPS contract truck driver Joe Coad walked in for his customary 4:15 pickup and said, “Got mail today?”

For the first time in weeks, Mr. T said, “Yes,” and Coad crowed, “Hot diggety! I can open my door again.”

Typical of the daily scene at the 47804 zip code station, two customers scooted in at the last minute with mail, doing business around a pair of bifocals somebody had left on Mr. T’s counter.

One of the customers was Rick Coppell, who had been on a two-week vacation to China and didn’t even realize the postal substation had been out of commission.

“What?!” Coppell said, when told of the drama.

After Coad hauled away the day’s mail, private customers like me — and some of the many 12 Points business owners who have sorely missed their contract postal unit this past month — gathered in front of the store with champagne to toast the reopening.

We made sure Mr. T had his high stool to sit on and a double helping of champagne.

Mr. Tilford is 84 (which is why I call him “Mister”), and he brings out the protective instinct in a lot of us north-enders. A 12 Points merchant for more than 40 years, he has operated the postal substation, or CPU, for three decades. The one-month suspension of his substation, while he searched for and secured a $20,000 surety bond, was hard on his pocketbook, his health and his friends.

Frail, in constant pain, but blessed (or cursed) with an iron work ethic, Mr. T is the human symbol of the entire 12 Points commercial corridor. If logic dictated, he and it should have disappeared at least 15 years ago.

Wipeout fires, shifting demographics and the abandonment of so many buildings and businesses in the historic district should have spelled The End of unfashionable 12 Points and its unofficial mayor with his retro variety store.

But Mr. Tilford won’t give up, and neither will the people around him — his landlord, Jay Jones; his next-door business neighbor, Rich Curtis; the district’s biggest employer, Comfort Keepers; Neil Ward and Amy Worthington of Medusa’s hair salon; Myrna and Jack Pigg, who own M&J; Mall, Anita at the Sewing Lounge, Jim of Jim’s Collectibles; Amy Witherell, who is the most efficient Girl Friday any business person could employ, and the Banks of the Wabash Chorus guys who own Harmony Hall.

Many of these folks joke about how the weekly crises that afflict 12 Points would make for a good soap opera. If it’s not a building owner who’s suddenly run out of remodeling money, it’s a busted sewer line or some obscure city ordinance that prohibits a shop owner from displaying her secondhand wares X-number of inches on a sidewalk.

Somehow, the 12 Points regulars always find a way to patch, repair, rework and make do.

In the column I wrote last week about Mr. T’s ordeal in his quest for a surety bond, one name and set of sensibilities were missing — Terre Haute postmaster Barb Matson’s. A personal obligation had taken her out of her chair at the main Terre Haute post office on Margaret Avenue the day I called for comment.

Although the USPS was capably represented by folks from the district office in Indianapolis, omitting Matson’s view was unfair to her and the local postal crew.

A 25-year veteran of the United States Postal Service, Matson is known for being community oriented. Rather than a name and a CPU number, she sees Mr. Tilford as “a very sweet man.”

Matson said she has been monitoring the surety bond dilemma since day one, trying to do whatever she could to move things along so Mr. T could get back in business. After Richard Witter, the CPU coordinator in the Indy USPS district office, extended by a week the deadline for securing the bond, Matson got it extended indefinitely.

Monday, after Mr. Tilford’s CPU had been up and running for a few hours, Matson made a special visit to see how he was doing.

“She stayed a good half-hour, just talking and looking at all the things we’ve got here,” said Mr. T.

That would be things like little birdhouse wind chimes, woven straw cowboy hats for adults and children, ceramic yard frogs, aprons that cover an entire outfit, men’s underwear, electric coffee makers, all-occasion greeting cards, kids puzzles, an array of artificial flowers for cemeteries and one blank marble headstone ready for engraving.

After the champagne toast, Mr. Tilford and his niece, Chris Barberry, started tidying up inside the store. As usual, the sound system was tuned to WFIU, the NPR station in Bloomington. Joe Bourne was playing Louis Armstrong tunes on his afternoon jazz show.

I asked Mr. T how he felt.

A little breathlessly, he said, “I think it’s going to take awhile for me to settle back into reality.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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