Gazette Online, IA
11-26-07
We’re losing the feeling of being a town
By Terry McCoy
The Gazette
RANDALIA — The school was the first to go. Years later, after months of limping
along, the grocery store shuttered.
And finally, last month, the Fayette County town's post office was "temporarily
suspended" when Pat Beman, the longtime officer in charge, retired.
Randalia, a northeast Iowa community of 84 people nestled near Oelwein and
Fayette, is dying, residents say, and the post office's closing is the latest victim.
The town is not alone.
Excluding the Council Bluffs area, 11 post offices in Iowa have been "suspended"
— or closed — in this year, according to U.S. Postal Service records.
Sometimes, such suspended post offices are reopened. But more often than not,
they remain closed and "under review," as the Postal Service calls it.
People in those communities send and receive mail through rural delivery, but
they must drive to a larger town's post office to ship weighted mail.
"It makes me sad," bemoaned Pat Custer, who's lived in Randalia for decades.
"I'm disgusted. Here's a service that I think we deserve."
Every November for going on 30 years, Custer and her husband, Chuck, walked
a few blocks to their post office to mail a birthday present to their son Mark. This
year, they didn't. Mark, who lives in Fremont, Neb., got a card.
The Custers refused to drive six miles down the road to Fayette, or the nine miles
to Maynard or the 15 miles to Sumner to mail a package.
"It really upsets me," Pat Custer said. "Look at gas prices these days! And the
time to do it — why, we used to be able to walk just down the road."
With the post office in town, Geraldine Winke, 70, said she could ship items until
its doors closed at 2:30 p.m. She said she now has difficulty getting organized to
meet the new mailing pickup time of 9:30 a.m. — when the rural delivery person
rolls down the gravel road into town.
"We're losing the feeling of being a town," she said.
Richard Watkins, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service, stresses that the
residents of Randalia — and other cities that have lost their post offices — have
not been forgotten.
"We provide universal service," he said. "... But if we're providing good service
from five miles away, what would you do? If no one (bids) on this job, what would
you do? It's a business decision. Our goal is to provide postal services, not to
continue to operate post offices in small towns."
Watkins said the Postal Service suspends offices when the postmaster or officer
in charge retires, when a storm tears apart a building or when a post office is
"structurally unstable."
Ed Harlow, one of the 28 residents of the southwest Iowa town of Carbon that
had its post office suspended in 2005, said life continued on the same after the
closure.
"We didn't lose our identity," he said.
It's no secret that Iowa's small towns, for the most part, are losing population as
people migrate to urban population centers for jobs, said Liesl Eathington, an
Iowa State University researcher of economics.
"They try as long as they can to stay in their community and commute,"
Eathington said. "But gradually, with the costs of transportation and the time
(spent on the road), you end up seeing people moving."
Small towns cinch their belts tighter and others unincorporate. Since 1980,
Randalia has lost 17 people — nearly 20 percent of its population, according to
census data.
But former Randalia Mayor Bill Bronn doesn't think conditions will get much
worse and, he said, something called character remains.
"The post office was our last stronghold with the outside world," he said.
"Everything else is gone, and I just hate to see it close in on us. But it's home,
you know? I want to see it stay the same."