Neither rain nor snow — nor the occasional school pageant or PTA meeting — could keep Patty Cress away from her appointed rounds as a Morgantown mail carrier.
For 42 years, Cress, who died last week after battling breast cancer, delivered on that job.
Delivery, first class.
Cress knew the people on the route by name.
The mail carrier was aware of their wedding anniversaries, the dates of their kids’ birthdays and which grandchild was graduating what college that weekend.
As for that dinged-up car in a driveway, well, a certain 16-year-old in the house did just get his license — and you know how that goes.
She was aware of these neighborhood doings not because she was nosy, mind you.
Or sneaking surreptitious glances in the envelope.
Cress knew all these things because the people on the route told her all these things.
They let her into their lives because she was just plain friendly — besides being just plain good at her job.
Small-talk about the weather, the Mountaineers and (good-natured) grousing about all those bills she was plopping into the box oftentimes turned into meaningful interaction and lasting friendship.
Her postal patrons were happily surprised whenever Cress, who was just as famous in the kitchen, also delivered a plate of cookies or a couple of slices of her signature German chocolate cake.
You know: Just to mark a special moment.
Once, she called 911 after discovering one man she knew who had collapsed and was unconscious. The mail would wait until the ambulance arrived.
Another time she called police, after spying an unfamiliar man taking photographs of homes in the middle of the day.
Which was why, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon — May 2, 2018 — people on her Suncrest route were waiting for her, as she showed up right on schedule.
A role model (without realizing it)
Mark Cappellini put a stamp on it, when her festooned U.S. Postal Service truck slowed to an idle in front of his house.
“Is today it?” he asked. “Are you really doing it this time?”
“Sure am,” she said. “I’ve got the signs to prove it.”
One of her granddaughters hand-crafted and hand-delivered them, just for the occasion.
“‘Finally, my retirement has been delivered,’” read the prominent one, affixed to the vehicle’s front.
For a couple of years leading up to the day, Cress, as she put it with a laugh, had “threatened” the above. Stepping away from the job that turned into a career, that is.
After all, she wanted to spend time her granddaughter, the sign-artist, and her other grandkids, as well.
Her family, including her kids and their kids, plus assorted cousins and other pals, picked up their mail in locales across West Virginia, Ohio, Arizona and Hawaii.
She wanted to deliver herself to their door.
There were her grandmother’s relatives still in Italy who were also aching for a trans-Atlantic visit.
Patty’s professional journey wasn’t always easy, she admitted, but she ended up making her own itinerary of self-awareness and persistence.
The mail carrier, who grew up in Morgantown, graduated from the former St. Francis High School. She attended college briefly, and soon found herself married, with three children.
Then, she found herself divorced, with three children.
She needed something with benefits and an actual paycheck.
A civil service job was a pretty good motivation for a single mom, so in 1976, she applied for one, and got hired, by the Morgantown Post Office.
In that star-spangled year celebrating America’s Bicentennial, however, she found out that some things hadn’t gone out of style since the beginning of the Republic.
That is, in some circles, women were still expected to know social geography, as it were.
It had taken until 1973 to finally earn the right to apply for a credit card on their own, under their own name.
Some of her early co-workers were hostile at the idea of her toiling shoulder-to-shoulder, with them.
“They said, ‘If she wants a man’s job, she has to be able to do a man’s work,’” Cress remembered.
In this case, it meant a diminutive woman wrestling with 100-pound sacks of mail.
It meant sometimes not being there for school plays or other mom-activities, since the mail must go through — and she didn’t dare call in.
And it also meant even having to sue once for sexual harassment, in a case she won.
Every day a special delivery
By 2018, she was a senior member of the mail-career team in Morgantown.
And by then, the chauvinism subsided, to make way for what guys have also been known to deploy in the workplace.
Jokes and pranks.
Most of them corny, but some of them legitimately funny.
During one birthday, she was reduced to doubled-over guffaws as her cake with its lit candles was wheeled in while she was readying for that day’s deliveries.
The punch line?
Said cake was accompanied by a co-worker with a fire extinguisher — that many candles could get dangerous, get it?
There were all the people and all the deliveries and all the times she ended up being a feminist role model, just by going to work.
On that May afternoon, people lined up for hugs and, in a switch, delivered envelopes to her.
Thank-you cards and other heartfelt notes, handwritten.
John Cavalier, her St. Francis classmate who lives along the route, looked over a couple of houses down at his friend, at work.
He snorted at a complimentary comment, made.
“ ‘Best mail carrier, ever?’ Slowest mail carrier ever. She’s too busy talking to people. It’s gonna take her two days to get this route done.”
Then, he winked and grinned, to let everyone know he was in full agreement with that compliment.
A celebration of her life and times will be from 4-8 p.m. April 13 at the Peace Hall of St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Star City.
Cress had requested her body be donated for medical research.
Call that one more delivery of love, her friends said.
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