By Jenny Neyman
Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Rick Huddleston delivers mail in Soldotna last week. He retires Friday after a 41-year career in governmental service, with 38 years spent in the U.S. Postal Service. In his 25 years as a carrier in Soldotna, he’s well-known for his cheery whistling and sunny attitude.
Redoubt Reporter
There’s catalogs, postcard reminders of dental checkups, bills and the other printed detritus that’s part and parcel to being a named, addressed member of society. Aside from the occasional quirk — wedding invitations, notice of jury summons, a package bearing the results of Internet impulse buying — the arrival of the daily mail is unremarkable, one second inhabiting its slot, the next shuffled off to the trash, filing system, or waiting-to-be-dealt-with pile. As ubiquitous as credit card offers, as autonomous as breathing.
On Friday, Whistling Rick’s 25-year show in a 20-block section of Soldotna will come to an end.
Residents of the section of Soldotna bounded by the Kenai Spur Highway, Sterling Highway and Knight Drive get mail rain or shine, ice or wind, smudged labels or unstuck packing tape, 30 below or 30-foot breakup puddles. Thanks to Rick Huddleston, they also get a tune.
“That man is always whistling. He has never walked in that door not whistling, not once. I don’t think he’s ever had a bad day. I don’t know how that’s possible, but he’s always cheerful. He is exceptionally endearing,” said Autumn Leach, at Planned Parenthood on Redoubt Avenue, which is one of the 75 businesses to which Huddleston delivers mail.
There’s no mystery about the mail in that section of town. It isn’t some unnoticed system operating in the background — out of sight, out of mind, out of earshot. With Huddleston, the arrival of the mail is an event, brief and efficient, yet noticed all the same.
It starts when he pulls up and shuts off the engine. His midheight, midweight frame gets out of the truck — always in his gray slacks and red-and-white-stripe-on-blue jacket, the same blue as his eyes, and almost always with his trimmed gray moustache curved around his pursed lips. Postal customers in the vicinity know their mail delivery is imminent.
“It’s loud. But when I say it’s loud I don’t want that to sound like a bad thing. It’s just, you’re inside your building and you know when the mailman’s here. You can hear his whistling from inside,” said Dawni Giugler, of First American Title on Birch Street.
Orie Moore, of Dr. Justin Moore’s orthodontia office on Binkley Street, likens it to childhood memories of the ice cream truck coming to her neighborhood. The tinny, tinkling notes from the truck’s speaker was a signal to scrounge up spare change and decide what treat she’d order. Now the cascading notes are a last-minute reminder to make sure her envelopes are stamped and ready.
“It’s almost like an arrival, an announcement. With him it’s kind of like that. We hear it, we know he’s
Huddleston whistles while carrying mail to apartments at Laurawood Arms in Soldotna.
coming, he’s going to be here any minute now,” Moore said.
The notes crescendo as Huddleston’s quick steps approach the door, then stop as he enters, replaced with a smile and greeting — always by name — of his customers.
“He makes a point of learning everybody’s name. When they’re new he makes sure he gets their name right away and calls everybody by name,” said Laura West, of First American Title.
“And he kids with us and he picks on us and he makes us feel like family. He’s just a wonderful person, we all feel the same way,” Moore said. “He always does a little extra than just delivering the mail. He seems to know if something’s going on with you, he can tell. He’s observant, he’s caring, he’s a friend to everyone, he really is.”
Huddleston has been delivering mail to the Moores’ office for the entire 25 years they’ve been in that location, and longer than many have been in his delivery area. Households and businesses have come, expanded, downsized, relocated or gone altogether. But the addresses have remained, and Huddleston has been the merry, melodic mailman attending to them since he took up the route in 1985.
There have been vacations, a busted shoulder, a knee operation and other influences within that span that led to brief periods of silence, where just the mail was carried, without a tune. That was more jarring than if delivery was late or packages were misdirected.
“Sometimes when he’s gone we’ll go, ‘Oh, the mail came.’ We didn’t even know when they came. Rick always says, ‘Hi.’ He never just sneaks in and drops off the mail. He always, always makes contact,” Moore said. “And there was a little while when he didn’t whistle, and everyone felt that. It was painful to not hear the whistling and we all thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ As soon as he whistled again it was like the whole world came back. The sun came back, we were all happy again. It was like, ‘Oh, good, wonderful, life goes on.’”
Postmark: Alaska
Mail service is planned, determined and scheduled. Huddleston’s entry into mail service was none of those
A dog takes an interest in Rick Huddleston as he delivers mail on Binkley Street in Soldotna. Huddleston has been bit by dogs eight times in his career, but says Alaska dog laws are much better than in Texas, where he started out as a letter carrier.
things.
“ I don’t know how I ended up doing this so long. I just did. I figured, well, I could make a 20-year career out of it and go do something else. Well, 20 years turned into 38, plus two years military, plus a year sick leave, so that’s 41. I don’t know if I’m going to do anything else now or not. I like this retirement idea,” said Huddleston, now 60.
He’s from Corpus Christi, in southern Texas, and retains a faint stamp of his former residency. There’s the drawn-out “weeeell” narrating his thought-gathering processes. A hint of a “u” bedding down in words with “o” sounds: “o(u)ld,” “co(u)ld.” And his nod to modesty in storytelling, uncovering the gems from a preface of, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but … .”
He attended about a year and a half of college after high school before deciding to join military service. His older brother was already in Vietnam, and that’s where Huddleston felt he should be. After losing a discussion over whether he was enlisting, as he intended, or being drafted, as the Army decided, he ended up in a unit that seemed to not be heading into action.
He transferred to the 82nd Airborne Division, figuring if he wasn’t going to Vietnam he might as well jump out of airplanes. His entire previous unit was subsequently sent to Vietnam, leaving Huddleston disappointed for years until his brother assured him there wasn’t any good he would have done there anyway.
At the end of his two years of service were opportunities for project transition training.
“They had two-week classes — carpentry, electrical. The last one that was open was postal. All the rest of them was filled up. I never thought I’d stay with it,” Huddleston said.
His first four years on the job — and the first two months, in particular — didn’t do much to convince him otherwise. He started out carrying mail on foot, walking about 20 miles a day, back in south Texas in the 1970s.
“In that four years I got dog-bit eight times,” he said. “It was pretty much house-to-house dogs. We have this dog spray called Halt. I used it about seven times a day.”
Dog laws in Texas in the 1970s were lax, far more so than they are in Alaska, Huddleston said. With that many canine run-ins, it’s easier to just track the more eventful ones.
“The only ones that count are the ones that draw blood,” he said.
The first one to do so was in his first two months on the job. It was a big dog, well-known to the carriers.
“Before you go in you’d take a rock and throw it over the house to the other side and he’d chase it, and you’d try to get up to the porch and deliver the mail and get back to the sidewalk before he’d come back. That was the standard procedure. Well, I didn’t make it one day. He caught me,” Huddleston said.
When the standard dog-avoidance procedure failed, the next standard procedure was to get a tetanus shot. He went to see a nurse to get the punctures on his backside cleaned.
“She took a bottle of alcohol with a big ol’ long Q-tip and stuck it in each one of those teeth holes and twisted. Ooh, this is fun,” he said.
As if dogs weren’t enough, add cantankerous Texas livestock to the mix.
“We’d been warned, ‘Be wary of the turkey, that turkey has an attitude.’ Boy, he had an attitude. If you came in the yard he’d come after you, just like a dog,” Huddleston said.
Huddleston’s folks moved to Alaska in 1974, followed by his brother and sister-in-law in 1975. In 1977, Huddleston was ready to follow to Soldotna, sight unseen, and attempted to talk his wife, Sally, into the idea.
“My brother talked about hunting and fishing and all that good stuff, and I was tired of south Texas, so me and the wife had a talk. I don’t know if I should tell you this, but she said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ with the agreement that we’d try it for two years and if one of us didn’t like it after two years, we’d leave. She wanted to leave within two weeks,” Huddleston said.
It was a cold winter, he said, with temperatures between 20 below and 35 below for three weeks straight.
“She wanted to know what we were doing here,” he said. “I get reminded frequently that our two years have come and gone. But I kind of made a joke out of it. I said, ‘Well, I said two years, the first year and the last year. I just don’t know when the last year is yet.’”
Despite her early misgivings about Alaska, Sally warmed to living here, even if not to the weather.
“We’ve been blessed here. I miss the warm weather, but it has been good for us as a family,” she said.
The couple raised three daughters — Stacy Correia, now 37, with five kids living a little south of Clam Gulch with husband, Robert; Wendy Superman, 35, of Nikiski, who’s expecting her first child with husband, Levi; and Julie Karsten, 32, of Wasilla, with two kids and husband, Chad. Sally worked at Beemun’s for about 10 years, and she and Huddleston are active members of the College Heights Baptist Church. The couple is on their second home, both built by Huddleston. They sold the first, where they raised their kids, on Murray Lane in 2000. Now they live in a smaller house on Community College Drive that Huddleston spent six years building after work and on weekends.
With Huddleston’s retirement, Sally is looking forward to having more of her husband’s time. But rather than lining him out on a list of projects needing to be done, she’s expecting to have to rein in his productivity for a little more relaxation.
“He makes his own project list, he has so much energy. I don’t make a project list for him, I try to hold him back. He just keeps too busy. I have to say, ‘Would you just slow down?’” she said. “I’m excited, for him and for us as a couple. We’ll spend more time with grandkids and traveling being together. We’re just looking forward to seeing what the next part of our lives have together, where it will lead us.”
Whistle while you work
Upon moving to Alaska, Huddleston transferred to a clerk job at the Soldotna Post Office. At that time there were six employees (compared to more than 20 now), including Postmaster Bobbye Tachick, and the office was situated on the Kenai River in the now-vacant white building at the corner of the Binkley Street and Sterling Highway intersection.
“My scheduled time was six o’clock. I’d show up at five and go fishing on the river. Then at lunchtime I’d go fishing on the river. And maybe even after work,” Huddleston said.
Thus began a long love of the Alaska outdoors. Once Soldotna created mail delivery routes in 1984 he switched to being a carrier in 1985, covering the same area of town he does today. He delivers by truck, but still spends much of his eight- to 10-hour-a-day shifts walking around.
“It’s good exercise. I’m out of the truck 150, 200 times a day, and out of the seatbelt 150, 200 times a day,” he said.
And it’s constant work, especially if he’s helping cover other routes or pitching in with the triple volume that piles up over the holidays — up to five semitrailer loads of parcels to be delivered, he said.
“In the postal service it’s productivity, productivity, productivity. Like in real estate it’s location, location, location. And that’s what you do. You’re on the clock, you’re working,” he said. “There was one year I said ‘I want to quit working so much overtime,’ because I average 300 hours a year. I said, ‘I want to get it down to 100.’ Well, that next year I worked 400.”
Consequently, he’s become accustomed to constant action. He walks at a fast clip, can’t sit idle for long and doesn’t think anything of putting in two to four hours on a building project after already logging eight to 10 on his feet on the job. Organization is the crucial key to efficiency in mail delivery.
“I’ve got friends that come over, they see my garage and they just go nuts over all my tools nice and neat, I’m so organized. I’ve always been that way,” he said.
But keeping up productivity doesn’t have to mean giving up pleasantries. Huddleston is as consistent in being friendly as he is his delivery schedule. You get to know people, seeing them and their mail day in and day out, he said — people’s hobbies, who makes a lot of charitable donations, who lost their dog or got a new one, whose kid is getting married, who’s off on vacation or home with an injury.
“A lot of times I’ll know who the mail belongs to without even looking at it,” he said.
He makes a point of learning names and greeting people on his route. It’s just part of doing a good job, he said.
It’s a lot more than that, his customers say, sharing stories of Huddleston going above and beyond the bounds of his job, especially on the personal side.
Mavis Blazy-Lancaster, who used to own the Laurawood Arms apartments on Shady Lane with her husband, Ken Lancaster, said Huddleston was always keeping an eye on the elderly tenants.
“You couldn’t meet a nicer mailman. If somebody’s mail hadn’t been picked up for a few days he’d come knocking on my door and say, ‘You’d better go check on them,’” she said.
Billi JoAnne Kaho, who lives in an upstairs unit of the Blazy Apartments on Binkley Street, said she’ll miss Huddleston more than he could know.
When she moved in 15 years ago, she didn’t give a second thought to getting up and down the stairs. Now, at 82, her balance is failing and bringing up the mail can be a daunting task.
“Going upstairs was nothing. Geez, we just flew up and down. Now I can’t do it very well. When there were heavy, big packages he brought them up the stairs for me so I did not have to walk down. He always fixed my mail so that it was in a nice pile with a rubber band around it so it was easy for me to pick up the one package and bring it up the stairs, instead of having a lot of loose mail rattling around,” she said.
She neglected getting her mail one day, and the next day Huddleston was at her door.
“He immediately came upstairs and wanted to see if I had fallen or if I was ill. Certainly that is not part of
Rick Huddleston gets a hug from Orie Moore, one of his postal customers, last week. Huddleston has been delivering mail to Justin Moore’s orthodontia office as long as it’s been in its location.
his job, and I am not the only one he has treated that way,” Kaho said. “He is just an exceptional person. He’s the son I wish I’d had, and at 82, I could have.”
Even beyond the punctuality, efficiency and friendly attitude, Huddleston’s career has been underscored by another characteristic — the whistling.
So, where does that come from?
“From the lips, mostly,” Huddleston said.
And his old man, who Huddleston remembers whistling when he was a kid. As an adult he remembers seeing his dad in his truck, driving down Binkley or Birch or another road on his route, whistling away behind the wheel, not even aware he was doing it.
It’s mostly unconscious for Huddleston, too.
“Most of the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it. I’ll carry a tune and somebody will ask, ‘What are you whistling?’ And I have to stop and think, ‘OK, what was I whistling?’ And then I can go back and tell them,” he said. “It might be a song I hear in the morning and I may whistle it all day. My wife goes crazy. I’ll be in the garage, it’s attached to the house, with the door open. I’ll be whistling, and it echoes. All of a sudden I hear the door slam — ‘Boom!’”
Whistle, as a blanket term, doesn’t do it justice. It’s much more refined, like a tuned musical instrument. The quality of the sound is akin to the idyllic chirps and whistles of a woodland-creature scene in a Disney movie, like “Bambi” or “Snow White.” Only with amplification more at home in a rock concert.
“It’s, well, I’m not going to say that. I was going to say ‘unmatched,’ but it’s not that. It’s unique,” Huddleston said. “I’ve got a trill to it, or, I don’t know what you’d call it. My old man couldn’t do it, but I can. I just kind of developed it.
“It puts me on good terms with pretty much everybody. Everybody knows me by my name, Whistling Rick.”
Final delivery notice
He’ll be Whistling Rick the mailman for only a few more days. Then he’ll be better known as Whistling Rick the builder, the grandpa, the halibut fisherman.
He’s got a shop to build, plus a fishing cabin in Seldovia, a cabin in Gray Cliffs north of Nikiski, a project for his church, and possibly a retirement house for he and Sally, one with a room big enough for her quilting projects, and with enough wall space for his license plate collection. He’d like to spend more time with his grandkids and on his buddy Jim Bookey’s boat with a halibut pole in hand.
“Fishing, building and more fishing. Put fishing in there three times, because I’m going to do a lot of that,” he said.
Bookey is retiring at the end of the summer, Huddleston said, and they’re already planning fishing trips, many around Seldovia, and one through the Inside Passage from Skagway to Ketchikan and back.
“We’ve got a lot of plans and we’ve got a lot of territory down there to explore. Our time is ours, except for what the wives want,” he said.
He was eligible for retirement in 2005, but it’s taken seven attempts over six years to make it happen.
“This is my seventh date that I set for myself that I said I was going to retire. I put it off, just different circumstances. I had two daughters get married in the same year, and other situations. But this is the first one that I sent my paperwork in, so it’s a done deal,” he said.
“I’ve got a lot of friends, and everybody on the route, when I told them, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do it this time,’ they said, ‘Yeah, right.’ They didn’t believe me, and rightfully so. But they’re believers now.”
Or as Huddleston may say in his Texas-tinged voice, “Weeeell,” reluctantly so.
“When Rick told us he was leaving, no one will ever be able to fill his shoes. Like I said to him, I am not going to be around on his last day. When I hear him coming I am going to the back. I refuse to acknowledge his last day,” Moore said. “It’s going to be really, really hard, because even when he takes time off you miss him. He goes the extra mile, for everybody. But he keeps telling us he’s a grandpa and he needs to spend time with his grandkids. We wish him well. He will be missed.”
Huddleston said he feels the same about his customers.
“I’ll miss seeing people on a daily basis. I pretty much know everybody on a first-name basis, and I make it a point to say their name when I go in. It just makes a good rapport, it’s a good idea and I try to leave them smiling,” he said.
After 25 years of leaving his Soldotna customers with mail in their boxes, a tune in their head and a smile on their lips, it’s time for Huddleston to deliver himself to other pursuits.
“Anymore, with everything that I want to be doing, this working at the post office is getting in my way. It’s time to move on,” he said.
“Am I ready? You betcha. I’m smiling.”
