Shawn L. Bird

I’m getting really irritated with the neighbourhood vandals who keep tipping over our community mailboxes.  They lie face up, so our boxes fill with rain water and our box locks seize up.  And of course, while the boxes are lying there, the postal carrier doesn’t deliver mail to us, and if there is something important we’re waiting for (like cheques or a writing contract, for example!) we just have to keep waiting.  

The city could install street lights on our street so that the boxes were illuminated better.  That might help.  Or they could put a triangle of support bars on the backs of the boxes (although that might just mean the vandals go the other way and push the boxes forward.  At least they wouldn’t fill with rain, though).   Many boxes in our community are cemented into the ground or bolted onto their cement pad, not just sitting on paving stones.  That would help, too.  While I wait for the post office to come up with a real solution to the issue, I’m thinking about Drew.*

Drew spent years as a teacher and administrator, though he’s been retired for a few years.  He lives in the country and his mail is delivered to a mailbox set on a post at the end of his drive-way.  Apparently every once in awhile some local hooligans would get it in their minds to play vandal baseball.  One would drive, while the other sat on window ledge of the passenger door, and whacked mail boxes as they drove by.  A lot of hooting and laughter accompanied this ride of mailbox doom.  The neighbours would hear the car, laughter, the smash, and then more hoots of delight as the vandals drove onto the next box.  In the morning, broken mailboxes and smashed posts littered the road and the ditches, making lots of work for everyone.

After years of dealing with youth, Drew knows students learn best from real experience.   He had replaced his mailbox once, only to have the vandals return to wreck it again a few months later.  Drew decided he was not going to replace it again.  He got busy in his shop.

A few months later, after the neighbours had all repaired their boxes again, Drew was in his living room  when he heard the telltale late night laughter that indicated another baseball game was about to begin.  He listened as the kids roared down the street, whacked a box into the sky, and laughed drunkenly.  The pattern was familiar as they approached: roar, whack, laugh, roar, whack, laugh, roar, THUNK, howl.  Then there was cursing, muttering, and the roar of the car leaving the neighbourhood.

Drew had decided his post needed to have a little reinforcement.  He’d set a 3″ steel tube into a deep concrete base, and then he’d filled the steel tube itself with concrete before mounting his mailbox on it. 

Drew’s mailbox remains firm after many years, and as an added bonus, so have his neighbours’ mailboxes.  A lesson was learned.

Maybe I should ask if Drew can think up a more secure system for our community mailboxes?

*name has been changed