Wilson retiring from post office

Lynn Wilson has made many friends in Comanche the past 10 years as the local postmaster. Next week, however, he will walk out the backdoor of the post office for the final time on April 29.

It will mark the end of a 34-year career that began in 1988 when at the age of 30 he decided he needed a job with a retirement plan and other benefits.

“When I first got out of school I worked as a carpenter building cabinets and stuff like that,” Wilson said. “Then I worked at and eventually owned a van conversion business. It was just one of those thing that I felt like I needed a retirement and all that kinds of stuff.”

He was hired as a postal worker in Waurika. He moved on from there at various sites before eventually landing the postmaster job in Ninnekah. He was there from 1996 to 2012 when he transferred to Comanche.

“The (Comanche) office is small and you get to meet and know your customers more than you do at a larger office,” Wilson said. “I’ve been blessed to have good employees. I have Jamie now, and before her was Joe and before Joe there was Tonya, who had been here for a long time. It’s made my job a lot easier.”

Wilson was born and raised in Duncan. He married his wife Freda in 1978, who is looking forward to having him home.

“Freda says I’ve got about a year’s worth of work to do on the house,” Wilson said. “I’m going to do a little bit of traveling and spend some time with my grandson. Just kind of enjoy life and not have to be anywhere at any particular time.”

He spent most of his life and career in the area, but he has the appreciation of many other postmasters from around the country as the official photographer of the organization’s conventions.

It all started by happenstance. In 2001, he went to a postmasters’ convention in Minneapolis. Digital cameras were new technology and he had purchased a point-and-shoot digital camera about the size of a deck of cards for $700.

He went to the hospitality room and was taking pictures with his camera when a man in a black biker jacket came up to him and started talking to him about the camera.

“This guy kept coming over and wanting to look at it and try it out, so I let him,” Wilson said. “I looked at this guy and I thought, ‘Man, I know him from somewhere,’ and I couldn’t place him. So, we keep taking pictures and about halfway through, it dawns on me, he’s the postmaster general of the United States.”

When Wilson went to excuse himself to go take pictures elsewhere, the postmaster general, Bill Henderson, asked if he could tag along. So they go downstairs and he enters with the postmaster general into a room with 3,000 people. Everyone begins to flock to the postmaster general and he asks Wilson to take pictures, which he did.

A couple of months later, he gets a call from the postmaster organization who realized Wilson was not at the convention as Henderson’s personal photographer, but was an actual postmaster himself. Wilson’s been taking photos at conventions ever since.

Back in Comanche, though, it is the friendships he has developed over the years with his customers that has brought him the most satisfaction and getting to know the customers on a personal level. They’re not just a name on an envelope or just someone buying a book of stamps.

And it’s not a job that is as easy as it looks.

“People would be surprised on how hard it is to do everything correctly,” Wilson said. “Everybody thinks it’s just an easy job and you just put a piece of mail in a box. You’d be surprised on how long it takes for someone to become a good employee because of all the things that we have to do.”

A USPS website estimates 8,530 packages pass through the Comanche post office each year.

Wilson said people would also be surprised to how much volume the post office does.

“We get 99 percent of the mail to people on time, but we do so much that one percent represents a lot of mail,” Wilson said. “It’s just surprising to me that we have a reputation of never getting anything to where it’s supposed to go on time.”