Postcards on the Edge

[scootie]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

The Hitchcock movie Lifeboat starred Hedy Lamarr and was filmed on a sound stage. For every scene, the cast climbed up a tall ladder into the elevated moveable boat to film.

Hedy had a very bawdy reputation, she'd filmed the world's first nude scene as a young actress years before.

Apparently she didn't wear underwear. Every time she climbed up that ladder into the lifeboat, the cast and crew got full view up her dress at the naked goods. Finally someone complained to Alfred Hitchcock.

"Well," said Hitchcock, "I don't feel this problem is within the jurisdiction of the Director. You should bring your complaint to wardrobe. Or perhaps to the hairdresser."

minor point.. It was Tallulah Bankhead in that role...all other details are correct...

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

You might ask him just how much Lead he has added to the sea shore environment over that time. Count the cartridges and give you a weight, add all the others with him and ask him to please, think about that.

It's a digital camera. Those are his pictures. Should I let him know

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

minor point.. It was Tallulah Bankhead in that role...all other details are correct...

You're absolutely right. A good friend of mine - he's in his early 90s and knew many of the Hollywood people back in the daze - told me Bankhead was more than enough to fit that anecdote.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Time For Plan C?

By ALEX WILLIAMS

RONA ECONOMOU was a lawyer at a large Manhattan law firm, making a comfortable salary and enjoying nights on the town when she was laid off in 2009, another victim of the recession. At first, she cried. “Then it hit me,” said Ms. Economou, now 33. “This is my one chance” to pursue a dream.

Six months later, feeling hopeful, she opened Boubouki, a tiny Greek food stall at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side, where she bakes spinach pies and baklava every morning. This was supposed to be her Plan B: her chance to indulge a passion, lead a healthier life and downshift professionally — at least by a gear. Instead, Ms. Economou finds herself in overdrive.

Six days a week, she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. (“before most lawyers”) to start baking. Instead of pushing paper, she hoists 20-pound bags of flour, gets burned and occasionally slices open a finger. On Mondays, when the shop is closed, she does bookkeeping and other administrative tasks.

So much for a healthier life. “The second I feel a cold coming on, I’m taking Cold-Eeze, eating raw garlic,” she said. “I can’t afford to shut the shop down.”

Plan B, it turns out, is a lot harder than it seems. But that hasn’t stopped cubicle captives from fantasizing. In recent years, a wave of white-collar professionals has seized on a moribund job market, a swelling enthusiasm for all things artisanal and the growing sense that work should have meaning to cut ties with the corporate grind and chase second careers as chocolatiers, bed-and-breakfast proprietors and organic farmers.

Indeed, since the dawn of the Great Recession, more Americans have started businesses (565,000 of them a month in 2010) than at any period in the last decade and a half, according to the Kauffman Foundation, which tracks statistics on entrepreneurship in the United States.

The lures are obvious: freedom, fulfillment. The highs can be high. But career switchers have found that going solo comes with its own pitfalls: a steep learning curve, no security, physical exhaustion and emotional meltdowns. The dream job is a “job” as much as it is a “dream.”

“The decision to become an entrepreneur should not be made lightly,” said Paul Bernard, an executive coach in New York who has advised professionals on starting small businesses. The press, he said, has made heroes out of former investment bankers and lawyers who transformed themselves into successful dog-jewelry designers and cupcake kings. “But the reality is that, even during boom times, most new businesses fail.”

Many are surprised to find the hours and work grueling.

That was a rude awakening for Mary Lee Herrington, a 32-year-old St. Louis native who worked at a white-shoe law firm in London. Two years ago she ditched her job as a fourth-year associate, making $250,000 and working 60-hour weeks, to pursue a new life as a wedding planner. Her experience? She enjoyed organizing galas as a law student at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was really creative, it was fun, I loved all the details: the party favors, the programs,” she said.

But soon after starting her one-woman business, Forever & Ever Events, she quickly found it wasn’t a 9-to-5 gig. Working out of the Primrose Hill apartment she shared with her husband, she often found herself glued to the computer past midnight, doing spreadsheet analyses of her new business, or writing copy for her Web site. Whenever a wedding date approached, she found herself pulling 17-hour days.

For her first client, a work colleague of a friend, she was so eager to prove herself that she charged $2,000 for a job that took five months. For another wedding, “the clients were very demanding of my time, so much so that when I broke down the fee by the number of hours, I was making close to £1 an hour,” Ms. Herrington said. (By comparison, her rate as a lawyer was $450 an hour.)

The arithmetic doesn’t account for the loss of free time. When you’re the boss, the workday never really ends.

Charan Sachar, 37, a former software engineer who lives near Seattle, used to spend his downtime perusing Etsy, the D.I.Y. crafts site. He daydreamed of an unfettered life at his kiln, creating Bollywood-inspired teapots and butter dishes.

In January, after 12 years in software, he quit to devote himself full time to his online store, Creative With Clay, which sells stoneware he designs and makes. (Last May, he told his story on Etsy’s “Quit Your Day Job” blog.)

Now, instead of spending his free time absorbed in visions of clay, he spends as much as 70 percent of his day on administration. He is not only his own boss, he is his own accountant, sales director, marketing manager and shipping clerk. That leaves little time to enjoy the hobby he loves.

“There are some days that I don’t make anything in my studio, mostly because I am doing everything else,” he said.

Former white-collar workers are also surprised by the demands of manual labor.

Last year, Jennifer Phelan, 27, left a marketing job at a large law firm to become a private Pilates instructor in Boston. She had envisioned a life of “workouts, getting lots of sleep and blogging every day about health and fitness,” she said. Instead, her classes start as early as 6 a.m. and she feels wiped out by day’s end, which can be 14 hours later.

“I preach to my students to make time for themselves, to treat their bodies as vital instruments,” Ms. Phelan said. “Now, I’m lucky if I get that in a few times a month.”

Matthew Kang, 26, a former commercial bank analyst in Los Angeles, has it worse. Last year, he quit his prestigious job to open Scoops Westside, an ice cream shop in Culver City. “I feel like a janitor sometimes,” he said.

At least janitors have a steady paycheck. Plan B might entail more freedom, but that often comes at the expense of financial security.

After Anne McInnis, 52, was laid off as a textiles design director at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, she and her live-in partner, David Zadeh, opened an antiques and jewelry shop in Hudson, N.Y., called 12: Modern Antiquities. As a retailer with no retail experience, she had trouble getting used to the uncertainty. On any given day, there’s no telling if 5 people or 50 will come through the door.

“With the shop, you do all your prep work, buying, merchandising and designing,” she said. “And it is a continuous process. And then you wait. And wait.”

Even when business is steady, the sacrifices are never far from mind. Is being your own boss worth the trade-off in medical benefits, gas allowances and paid vacations? AnnaBelle LaRoque, 28, a former pharmaceutical representative in Columbia, S.C., still wonders. “There have been many times when I have had oatmeal for dinner and Grey Goose for dessert, contemplating these questions,” said Ms. LaRoque, who gave up those perks to start a dress line, LaRoque.

Sometimes, keeping a dream job alive also means getting a second job. Before Ms. Herrington, the wedding planner, landed on her feet, she took a part-time job at the London Business School, coordinating a counseling program, that paid $18 an hour.

“It was a drag, but it was necessary because I had bills to pay and student loan payments every month,” she said.

For some career switchers, the toughest challenges aren’t the financial or physical hazards, but the emotional ones.

The risk of isolation is ever-present without co-workers to lean on. There are no bosses to take the heat in moments of crisis, no team to share the triumphs — or the blame when things go wrong. And as Beth Conroy found out, rejection feels more personal when it’s a one-person shop.

Last April Ms. Conroy, 35, quit public relations to become a licensed acupuncturist, opening a practice in Manhattan. She worries whenever a client doesn’t return. Was the ailment cured? Or “is it something I’ve done,” she said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty if I let it become a reflection of me.”

Self-esteem comes up in another way. Leaving behind white-collar security can mean losing your identity as a breadwinner — a “loss of control,” as Jackie Alpers of Tucson put it.

After being laid off from a luxury spa as its media relations coordinator, Ms. Alpers, 43, started a career as a food photographer for cookbooks and magazines. She loves the creativity, but dreads not knowing about the next gig and possibly failing to keep up her “end of the bargain” in maintaining a household with her husband.
“Women have worked hard for equality,” Ms. Alpers added. “I sometimes felt that I was taking a step backwards.”

For some, the unexpected pitfalls can be so treacherous that they no longer consider Plan B a dream job, but a nightmare. That was the unfortunate lesson for Anne-Laure Vibert, 31, who gave up a marketing job in New York, planning glamorous parties for Audemars Piguet, the watchmaker, to become a chocolatier.

A few years ago, she moved to Paris to apprentice with a master chocolatier. Visions of decadent bonbons swirled in her head. Instead, she felt like a modern-day Lucy in the candy factory, hunched over in a chocolate lab packing chocolates and scrubbing pots. If she wasn’t doing that, she was sweeping floors, wrapping gifts, answering telephones or shipping orders.

After four months, she had had enough and called it quits. Her Plan C? She returned to New York and took a job with her old boss, doing marketing for another luxury brand. “It got very lonely, to be honest,” she said.

THIS is not to say that success is unattainable. Martha Stewart, after all, became Martha Stewart as a Plan B after abandoning a career as a stockbroker. And with the exception of Ms. Vibert, everyone interviewed said that despite the unforeseen bumps, they would not trade their new lives for their old jobs.

“I no longer walk with a slight depressed hunch,” said Ms. Herrington, the wedding planner, who is now enjoying steady work and glowing write-ups in wedding blogs like 100 Layer Cake. Her friends, she added, said they noticed an instant improvement in her appearance, too. “I no longer see chunks of hair falling out due to stress.”

“Before, I never wanted to talk about work, other than to complain,” she added. “Now I like talking about my work so much that my husband has to actually ask me not to talk about it all the time.”

Ms. Economou, the Greek baker, says she feels spiritually transformed. “I’m coming up on my one-year anniversary, and I love it,” she said. “I love being a part of the neighborhood. I didn’t realize how you become friends with your customers.”

And Ms. Alpers, the cookbook photographer, said the hard work and anxiety are starting to pay off, creatively and financially. Lately, she has shot covers for a crime novel and a nonfiction book about ghosts, and took photos for an Angry Birds tie-in cookbook.

“Even though I hate taking on all the responsibility myself and I’m often crazed,” she said, “the moment that I hold a book I’ve completed, it makes up for all the uncertainty of getting there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/fa..._r=1&ref=style

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

What everyone has to learn to understand is that we have destroyed the old business model of a small local business that brings in sufficient income to enable a good life; for a new business model where everything is manufactured in Asia at the lowest possible cost and sold here for the highest possible cost; by a very small number of sales outlets.
Today, because we no longer operate that old fashioned model, there is insufficient prosperity, spare cash money, floating around the economy; that used to pay for the good life.

A very good example came to me recently with the TV show about the life of the motor racing star Sir Jackie Stewart. His childhood was as the son of a small petrol station and garage owner. The sort with four pumps outside and a workshop to make average repairs to cars, set up close to a small town. Yet, looking at the pictures of the garage and then looking at the way he could afford to do things with his life; their standard of living as a family was way above anything attainable today.

Our BIG problem is the long term loss of prosperity; spare cash float if you like, outside of the existing FIRE economy; that is needed to pay for all the many millions of new small business owners that must set up to become the longer term employers of the rest of the population.

The challenge is to find an effective method for replacing that prosperity.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

What everyone has to learn to understand is that we have destroyed the old business model of a small local business that brings in sufficient income to enable a good life; for a new business model where everything is manufactured in Asia at the lowest possible cost and sold here for the highest possible cost; by a very small number of sales outlets.
Today, because we no longer operate that old fashioned model, there is insufficient prosperity, spare cash money, floating around the economy; that used to pay for the good life.

A very good example came to me recently with the TV show about the life of the motor racing star Sir Jackie Stewart. His childhood was as the son of a small petrol station and garage owner. The sort with four pumps outside and a workshop to make average repairs to cars, set up close to a small town. Yet, looking at the pictures of the garage and then looking at the way he could afford to do things with his life; their standard of living as a family was way above anything attainable today.

Our BIG problem is the long term loss of prosperity; spare cash float if you like, outside of the existing FIRE economy; that is needed to pay for all the many millions of new small business owners that must set up to become the longer term employers of the rest of the population.

The challenge is to find an effective method for replacing that prosperity.

1st world micro-finance?

Kiva for the suburban set?

I"m also at odds of how small business incubation can be re-developed.....I do recall an article and website on a business incubation outfit targeting university students that sounded promising.....$10,000 for a very small equity percentage....LOTS of $10k seeds being spread around to initially test ideas with a strong internet focus..I'll try and find it....looked pretty cool from a cocktail napkin approach.

I wonder if these white collar workers jumping into the ice cold water of a sinking Titanic with a few life jackets are doing so with a reasonable degree of success.

If Thomas Stanley's Millionaire Mind/Next Door research is to be believed, I wonder if the "artisanal" dreams of the white collar folks who jump overboard are being realistic or are they still living in the shadow of a former economy?

The self-employment options chosen still feel quite artificial/old economy to me.

If I have my way and make(or more likely protect) enough in the coming years I'd like to focus on two things:

http://www.techshop.ws/

And VERY early seed funding in the $10-25K range

[c1ue]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

What everyone has to learn to understand is that we have destroyed the old business model of a small local business that brings in sufficient income to enable a good life; for a new business model where everything is manufactured in Asia at the lowest possible cost and sold here for the highest possible cost; by a very small number of sales outlets.
Today, because we no longer operate that old fashioned model, there is insufficient prosperity, spare cash money, floating around the economy; that used to pay for the good life.

While I have always agreed with the principle behind your view, I have and continue to disagree that capital is the barrier to the 'old fashioned model'.

The issue isn't the business model per se - although there are absolutely problems with it.

The issue is FIRE has driven up the cost of living so much in the US that labor competitiveness is nil. FIRE + Health-ogolopy make the gap in labor costs so large that productivity differences are nullified.

Your example is instructive: I'd bet a big pile of money that the cost to buy and operate a gasoline station then, as a ratio to average wages then, was far smaller than it is today. A gasoline station today costs low 7 figures, plus likely 6 figures in operating expenses.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

There's a misconception that large corporations are inherently anti-regulations. The more costly regulations often act as an insurmountable barrier to new competition, with start-up ideas stillborn on the back of the napkin.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

The issue is FIRE has driven up the cost of living so much in the US that labor competitiveness is nil. FIRE + Health-ogolopy make the gap in labor costs so large that productivity differences are nullified.

Your example is instructive: I'd bet a big pile of money that the cost to buy and operate a gasoline station then, as a ratio to average wages then, was far smaller than it is today. A gasoline station today costs low 7 figures, plus likely 6 figures in operating expenses.

Here is an article (New York's Meatpacking District Draws Levi's as McCartney Decamps to Soho) from Bloomberg that, in my opinion, gives an example of the distortions introduced into the markets by the FIRE economy. The line that caught my eye was, "Asking rents for the highest-quality retails spaces in the Meatpacking District averaged $400 to $500 a square foot in July...."

I'm somewhat familiar with rents for commercial real estate in less-expensive markets and the numbers quoted in the article are numbers one would typically see for outright purchase of a property, not merely rent. Or in this case, economic rent.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

minor point.. It was Tallulah Bankhead in that role...all other details are correct...

Thanks for the correction; I should always double check my facts, big or small...

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

While I have always agreed with the principle behind your view, I have and continue to disagree that capital is the barrier to the 'old fashioned model'.

The issue isn't the business model per se - although there are absolutely problems with it.

The issue is FIRE has driven up the cost of living so much in the US that labor competitiveness is nil. FIRE + Health-ogolopy make the gap in labor costs so large that productivity differences are nullified.

Your example is instructive: I'd bet a big pile of money that the cost to buy and operate a gasoline station then, as a ratio to average wages then, was far smaller than it is today. A gasoline station today costs low 7 figures, plus likely 6 figures in operating expenses.

Absolutely agree. No one seems to have given any thought to the end result of gaming the price of the house you buy to live in when not at work. The overhead cost today is totally out of kilter with our competitors.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

You might ask him just how much Lead he has added to the sea shore environment over that time. Count the cartridges and give you a weight, add all the others with him and ask him to please, think about that.

Lead shot isn't used in current or recent production rimfire or centrefire cartridges.

Lead shot has not been used in shotgun shells for quite some time as well.

Does solid lead shot actually represent a genuine environmental threat or is it another means of attacking the pro-gun crowd?

I'd think the majority of the risk is from shooters not washing their hands and touching their faces/food/drinking water after a big day shooting/reloading/cleaning firearms.

I'm asking because I simply don't know...but am admittedly skeptical...I do a lot of shooting for work and sport.....I haven't shot lead since I was a kid.

On the note of foraging for food on the foreshore.....I have to admit to seeing far more of an Asian influence and indigenous(Maori) folks than whitey.....except for me of course.

Growing up in the US along the seaside in the summers I'm quite thankful to be able to go out my door 50m to collect some mussells for a feed....except the part where our recent serious quakes caused the need to dump untreated water into the ocean for a spell....

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

the tides come in

and the tides go out,

and depending on the economy,

the clammin' whiteys do the same

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Americanos In Need Of A Frosty

This American summer, the heat is the least of it. A pummeled economy. A credit-rating embarrassment. More tarmac ceremonies for dead war heroes. Tornadoes, floods and other disasters, including Congress. Presidential aspirants stalking Iowa like Barbie and Ken zombies.

Clearly, the country needs to pull off the road and take a break. It needs to treat itself to a soft-serve cone, chocolate-dipped and melting so quickly as to demand a tongue’s sculpting attention, while tiny tree creatures sing their carpe diem serenade, and reassurance comes with a stray evening breeze.

A tasty-twirly-twisty place has to be around here somewhere. There always is.

There’s one. In the Kenhorst Plaza, just outside the small city of Reading, a Dairy Queen shares asphalt space with a Dollar Tree, a Sears hardware store, a Fashion Bug, a food market, a pawn shop and a few vacant storefronts. It is the neon beacon of comfort in a tired commercial tableau.

Inside, though, this Dairy Queen seems different from the 5,000 others lighting up the country’s summer nights. It has the standard freezer filled with Dilly Bars, and the black-and-white photographs evoking a past that includes the first Dairy Queen, in prison-centric Joliet, Ill., in 1940. But plaques and letters and children’s handwritten notes cover nearly every inch of available wall, all praising someone clearly without Pennsylvania Dutch roots; someone named Hamid.

The Cumru Elementary School thanks Hamid. The Mifflin Park Elementary School thanks Hamid. The Brecknock Elementary School thanks Hamid. The Governor Mifflin intermediate, middle and high schools thank Hamid. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, the soccer leagues and the baseball leagues, the Crime Alert program, the home for adults with mental retardation — they all thank Hamid.

And here comes the owner, Hamid Chaudhry, in the midst of another 80-hour workweek, fresh from curling another soft-serve. As he makes his way to a corner table, customers hunched over chicken-strip baskets and sundaes call out his name, and he calls back theirs.

“Hi, Tracey; I have that check for you.” “Bye, Mrs. Brady. All good for the homecoming?” “Bye, Mr. Rush. How was the Blizzard? Want another one?”

With such familiarity, you might think that Mr. Chaudhry, 40, grew up rooting for the Reading Phillies and taking late-night rides up to the iconic Pagoda on Mount Penn.
But in words inflected by his Pakistani roots and slight speech impediment, he explains that he has lived in southeastern Pennsylvania only since the uncertain year of 2002, not long after Sept. 11.

Then, as a couple of local officials he knows catch up by the window, and a former state police officer he knows picks up a frozen cake, and a Mennonite family, regular customers, eat his soft-serve out on the patio, Hamid from the Dairy Queen tells his American story.

He was the youngest of six in a Muslim family in Karachi. His father, an accountant, was physically and mentally damaged after being hit by a car; his mother, a schoolteacher, took care of her husband and insisted that her baby go to America for a better life. That meant Chicago, where a brother was driving a cab while studying to become a college professor.

Mr. Chaudhry took several years to earn a college degree in finance, partly because of language difficulties, and partly because he was always working — mostly at the celebrated Drake Hotel. He was the unseen busboy, working his way up to assistant manager for room service and minibars, serving Caesar salad to President-elect Bill Clinton, delivering unsatisfactory apple pancakes to Jack Nicholson, tending to the dietary needs of a guest named Lassie. The Drake became an immersion course in Western pop culture.

He became an American citizen and started a career in financial-accounting software, eventually moving to New York, where he got fired. (“Wall Street wasn’t for me,” he says.) But he did meet a medical student named Sana Syed. Their first meeting was with her parents; the second was for a coffee at Starbucks; the third a brunch at a diner; and, finally, a dinner date at an Outback Steakhouse.

After they married in 2001, she landed a residency at the Reading Hospital and Medical Center. While his wife worked 90 hours a week, Mr. Chaudhry mustered the nerve to ask the owner of the local Dairy Queen, at Kenhorst Plaza, whether he wanted to sell. When he heard yes, Mr. Chaudhry scraped, mortgaged and borrowed to meet the asking price of $413,000.

He completed his classroom training at Dairy Queen’s headquarters in Minnesota, where he studied everything from labor management to the proper way to hand a customer a Blizzard. On June 27, 2003, he finally opened the doors to his Dairy Queen, but he was so jittery, intent on making every customer feel extra, extra special, that one employee quit on the spot. Oh, and the soft-serve machine malfunctioned.

Once he found his footing, Mr. Chaudhry decided to give back to the community, and held an elementary-school fund-raiser in which he provided the parent-teacher organization with 25 percent of the sales. Though the $450 seemed a generous amount, the publicity he received did not seem right to him.

“It felt like I got more in return than what I was giving,” he says.

Just like that, the Dairy Queen began to become the center of communal good, notwithstanding its contribution to the high obesity rate recorded among adults in Berks County. Mr. Chaudhry immersed himself in fund-raising, splitting everything 50-50 so that he only covered his costs. Good for promoting the business, yes, but also good for Hamid.

“My customers have made me well-to-do,” Mr. Chaudhry explains. “They patronize me, so why wouldn’t I give back?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/us....html?_r=1&hpw

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Facing the Loss of a Little Building, Much More Than a Place for Stamps

By LIZ LEYDEN

NORTH HOOSICK, N.Y. — In the center of this hamlet sits a tiny building the color of the sky. It is a blue so bright and so rich, it seems more suited to a Caribbean beach bungalow than to the rural hills of upstate New York.

Cars stop to snap photographs, for besides the color, there is the size: 12 feet by 20 feet. Spent irises line a small patch beside the front door. A lace curtain hangs in the window, though this is not a home, not a shop, not a small country museum.

It is the North Hoosick post office, the second smallest in the nation. Located in a corner of northeastern Rensselaer County dotted with historical sites — the Bennington Battlefield to the east, Grandma Moses’s grave site to the south — this whimsical building, built in the mid-1950s, defines a small town where little else remains.

But soon it, too, may disappear.

The post office is one of more than 3,600 that the Postal Service is considering closing. A decision is not expected until later this year, but residents are already worried that their community — about an hour’s drive northeast of Albany, near the Vermont and Massachusetts borders — will lose more than just a place to buy stamps.

Manufacturing and mill jobs have left North Hoosick, as they have much of upstate New York. Just past the post office, tall grass climbs the sides of the old Methodist church, which is empty and up for sale. Along the hamlet’s two main roads, a fire station, a used-car lot and an auto repair shop remain, but the number of gathering places has dwindled.

Yet neighbors still find one another: over pie and hamburger noodle soup at Jean’s Place; under the night sky at Hathaway’s, one of a few drive-in theaters left in the area — and at the post office.

Louis Paul, 68, a veteran from White Creek, stopped by one recent morning. He has one of the 124 old-fashioned brass boxes that line the wall. Rather than using keys, customers spin letter combinations around a star-shaped lock. A small glass window below the lock lets Mr. Paul peer in.

“Good,” he said. “No mail, no bills.”

Mr. Paul rented the box three years ago to receive medication that could not be delivered to his rural road. He realized quickly that his daily stops were motivated by more than picking up the mail.

“More times than not, I spent an hour outside here, just visiting,” he said.

Ken Stevens, 43, a Postal Service clerk, has helped staff this and other local post offices for 17 years. In North Hoosick, he said, he can count on conversation.

Customers ask about the Little League team he coaches for his son Andrew, 11; they follow the pitching of his 14-year-old daughter, Chelsea; they reminisce about his aunt, Joan Morrison, who was North Hoosick’s postmaster for two decades.

“They tell me she kept a picture of the smallest post office, in Florida,” he said, referring to Ochopee, Fla., whose 7-foot-by-8-foot post office is, indeed, the nation’s tiniest.

Mr. Stevens said he would continue to work at nearby post offices if the North Hoosick one closed.

“I probably feel like most people: it’s a part of Americana going by the wayside,” he said. “It’s been part of my life, my family’s life, for so many years.”

Theresa Bornt, 53, said the way customers were known and treated set this office apart. “If you’re waiting for something and get there when they open, even if they haven’t sorted for the day, they’ll find it for you,” she said. “Right then and there.”

Her voice rose in frustration.

“It’s the second-smallest post office in the country and the only thing we have that identifies this place,” Ms. Bornt said. “There’s no city hall or anything, only this and the drive-in, and both are pretty much extinct. That’s what bothers me. It’s just one more thing that makes you feel defunct.”

Barry Arnold, 55, a contractor from neighboring Walloomsac, has held the same box for more than 30 years. Visiting it reminds him of his childhood.

“There used to be a school bus stop out front here,” he said. “We’d go inside when it was really cold, talk to the mail lady and stay warm. They’ll probably knock it down and make a parking lot.”

He shook his head. “Or a dollar store.”

Losing the post office would not mean losing the town’s ZIP code, which would travel with the addresses should customers move their boxes to nearby offices. The Hoosick Falls post office, a stately brick building itself on the National Register of Historic Places, is just three miles away.

But for many of the elderly residents who rent boxes, the distance is daunting, especially during the winter. For others, the neighboring communities, though similarly rural to an outsider’s eye, are simply not interchangeable.

“We’re not Hoosick Falls: nothing like it at all,” Kevin Morgan, 69, said.

Mr. Morgan was among the last of the morning’s dozen customers. He stood outside and described what North Hoosick meant to him: the fields that run to the Walloomsac River; the neighbors who care for one another; this “unique” post office.

“We’ll be sorry to see it close, I can tell you that,” he said. “Why would you want something like this to close? I can understand the post office being in the shape it’s in, but there’s something about this place.”

Mr. Morgan stopped, looking at the building. Its blue paint stood out against the bright sky, clear but for a cluster of thick white clouds over its roof.

He raised his hand and swept it through the air. “We love it,” he said. “We honestly do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/ny...l?ref=nyregion

Today's America can be framed in many ways. Remember the old crank that lived alone in the shuttered house down the street. This is his day to shine . . . .