The duties of each of these heads are very clearly defined by Postmaster Morgan, and each head is held to strict responsibility for the faithful and efficient conduct of his division or department. The postmaster himself is ever ready to give advice and counsel, and is the most accessible of executives, not only to his staff, but to employees of all rank and to the public. He in turn requires of all of his aides not only a thorough knowledge of every detail of their work, but also that they shall be as accessible to those under them and to the public as he is himself.
The Postmaster's Weekly Conference
Once each week the postmaster meets his division heads and department chiefs in formal council, when the problems of the service are freely discussed and plans are formulated for such undertakings as may require unity of action and coöperative effort. These conferences keep the various heads apprised of what is of importance in the various departments, and promote an esprit de corps and coöperative attitude that explain the exceptional unity of effort that is characteristic of the entire organization. One has only to study the organization for a short time to discover that one of its strongest features is the manifest team-work, the one animating and controlling influence throughout it all being "the interest of the service."
The Delivery Division
Closest to the heart of the public of all the postal employees—probably because they see so many of them and know so much of their faithful work as they plod along day in and day out, in all kinds of weather, with their heavy loads weighing down their shoulders and twisting their spines—are the letter-carriers. These are all under the Division of Delivery, the superintendent of which is Mr. Charles Lubin. Mr. Lubin entered the service in 1890, as a substitute clerk, and is another example of the executive who has risen, step by step, through all the various clerical grades to supervisory rank, and then through the various supervisory ranks to his present title. The Delivery Division includes in its personnel, in addition to 2954 letter-carriers, 3621 clerks, 282 laborers, and 1800 substitute employees, so that it constitutes a small army in itself.
The New York post-office covers both Manhattan and the Bronx, with a postal population which greatly exceeds the population as shown by the census. To New York gravitate daily hundreds of thousands of people who are employed in Manhattan and the Bronx but who reside in Brooklyn, New Jersey, Long Island, or elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of others reside at one address in Manhattan or the Bronx, but do business at another, receiving mail at both addresses. Including these, the transients, and the commuters mentioned, it is estimated that the Delivery Division is receiving mail for approximately 8,000,000 addressees in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx.
Adequately to meet the requirements of this vast number there are scheduled, for the business section of the city, six carrier deliveries daily, and four for the residential sections. Just what this means will be better appreciated if one will pause and try to visualize what it means to traverse every street and alley of the great area covered by Manhattan and the Bronx from four to six times daily, stopping at every door for which there is mail, and effecting delivery in apartments, in tenements, in office buildings, and in factories.
Of the 2954 carriers mentioned above, 384 are employed in collecting mail from the street boxes, both package and letter, and from the chutes in office buildings, etc. From the boxes in remote suburban districts three to five collections are made daily, from boxes in the residential sections from seven to fifteen collections daily, while in the business sections the collections run from fifteen to twenty-seven.
Even with the frequency of collection that takes place in the intensively developed business sections, the boxes fill up as quickly as they are emptied.
To appreciate how quickly, and to make clear the volume of mail collected by the carriers, it may be stated that among the office buildings equipped with chute letter-boxes are the Equitable Life, thirty-nine stories, and the Woolworth, fifty-five stories, from each of which fifty-five to sixty full sacks of mail are collected by the carriers daily between 3 and 7.30 P.M. These sacks are conveyed by wagons to the Varick Street Station for postmarking and despatch, four carriers being engaged on the task.