Don’t know about the OP, but the mailman is not supposed to disrupt mail delivery unless told to do so, and the reason given in the OP does not apply.
While I agree about the fallibility of memory, there are certain things that just so memorable that they just stick. You can’t make things like this up. It’s not a question of getting some details wrong.
Just noticed this - it depends a lot on which world you lived in. I got married in 1987. I was the first woman I actually know who didn’t change my name when I got married - and I didn’t know anybody in the 70s or 80s who lived with someone of the opposite sex before marriage.
I lived in mixed gender households starting in 1985 and it wasn’t a big deal. There were often couples in the houses. Unmarried couples were boringly common throughout the 80s in my experience as were married couples with different names although the woman changing her name was much more common.
I’m a weird case, maybe. In 1989 I moved into a house with five people whena roommate moved oit and I took her place. None of us knew each other before we moved in and I’m still good friends with three of them. One of them, we hooked up about six weeks in and ended up getting married in 1993 and divorced in 2006. We’re still best friends.
Through our engagement we never once discussed the name change thing. I assumed that she’d keep her surname. I literally didn’t know that she wanted to take my name until we were filling out the paperwork three days before the ceremony. Similarly through the friendly divorce. I figured that she’d go back but she wanted to keep it.
Except that it goes against postal rules, and some people do make things up for a more exciting story. The NYT has been caught with that a couple of times, IIRC.
I have no trouble believing that an opinionated traditionalist on a power trip would try to deny someone services because of how they chose to live. Even in 2024 we still have pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control medication, doctors asking patients if their husband is OK with them getting their tubes tied. People do that, and they enjoy doing that.
Having said that, personal beliefs have never been an acceptable reason for a postman not to deliver mail. I could imagine a situation where a postman did it because they felt the postal customer was too timid to make trouble. Or, I could imagine a situation where a postman provided less-than-stellar service after making some unkind remarks about living arrangement, and the customer drew their own conclusions.
But it’s hard to imagine a scenario where a postman openly states “I’m refusing delivery because you are cohabitating”, because that’s just asking to get fired from a government job with nice benefits, in the 1970’s or any other time. It’s never been within their purview IIRC.
If it’s true, it was probably more the passive aggressive “Mr. Collins lives here. Ms. <Maiden Name> obviously doesn’t, so I’ll bring that back to the post office.”
Sure- but people break rules all the time. Do you really think no postal worker in the US ever accepts a bottle of wine worth more than $20 or cash as a Christmas gift?
True, but would the gift giver complain about that?
Nope, the gift giver wouldn’t complain. - but plenty of people break all sorts of rules either assuming they won’t get caught or that no one will complain or that no one above them will care. I bet the people who wouldn’t hold all the mail for my house didn’t think I would go over the local postmaster’s head and complain to the Consumer Affairs office. But I did.
Former county clerk Kim Davis, for example.
I would agree it was likely something like that, some kind of passive-aggressive game that could’ve been played off as confusion. Especially once or twice, enough to leave someone feeling disrespected, but not enough that their manager could construe it as a pattern of purposeful conduct.
If they said it outright and it was an ongoing thing, I would find that surprising, because it would be a bright-line firing offense. Probably wouldn’t need to escalate beyond the local branch. But, maybe these particular customers just didn’t feel like making a stir about it for whatever reason. Not everyone will make a stink even when they’re well within their rights to do so.
Overall I completely agree w your first two paragraphs.
As to the third I vehemently disagree. There are a lot of first- and second-level supervisors who agree completely w that a**hole POV. So a bottom level worker can be exactly as bigoted / a**holic as is their boss.
We in the USA are about to find out what happens when every MAGA-leaming government employee at every level decides to enact their own personal job description and service standards according to MAGA-first principles.
The OP asks about an event which happened in 1970, when Mrs. Collins was a student at Amherst. And I agree that it seems a bit unusual for 1970, especially near the campus of a liberal university.
But if we go back only 3 years to 1967–it seems very reasonable that a postman could refuse to deliver her mail, and even proudly believe that the law required it. In 1968, Universities still had rules preventing unmarried students from living together.
So by 1970, it’s easy to imagine that the same postman would still act that way( even if he would have to be more discreet about it).
The sexual revolution that we all take for granted now, --the famous “sixties”-, was not easily accepted by much of American society.
As I said, although it is hard to believe now, but… in 1968, universities still had rules preventing unmarried students from living together. These rules had been in place for decades, enforced by the legal doctrine of “in loco parentis”, which said that since students were minors (voting age was 21, as was the age for signing contracts) , the university was expected to act “in place of the parents”, and had the right and the duty to supervise students’ behavior. The courts had been gradually weakening the legal status of “in loco parentis” during the 60’s…but it was still ingrained in many places, both as formal law and social custom.
Here are some quotes from an academic paper by a professor of sociology:
(note my bolding)
[quote]In March 1968, the New York Times reported on Barnard College student Linda LeClair, who had circumvented university rules to illicitly live off campus with her boyfriend, a Columbia University student. The couple sparked a widespread debate about cohabitation; referred to as The LeClair Affair, this incident created widespread public awareness of cohabitation as a viable relationship, along with moral panic about that possibility (Danziger & Greenwald, 1977; Pleck, 2012)
Pleck (2012) traces the growth of cohabitation in the US and notes that in 1962–1967 cohabitation was viewed as low class, and more common among minorities, interracial couples and bohemians, but that after the1968 LeClair affair, cohabitation began to be viewed as part of the counterculture and “‘new morality’ of the young”; she notes by the late 1970s cohabitation was seen as a legitimate family form [/quote]
(source: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/A_Kuperberg_Premarital_2019.pdf
The 1980 Census added a new category to describe a certain living situation, an unmarried romantic couple. POSSLQ or Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. It was considered at least reasonably common and uncontroversial by then.
I’ll suggest the OP’s question is really more IMHO:
Could some postal person choose to not deliver mail because they disapprove of [whatever]? Sure. Could they get in trouble with their boss? Sure. If the boss cared about following the letter of the rules.
OTOH, if the boss held the same opinion as the worker, good bet the worker’s behavior would be at least tacitly encouraged.
I think here in the USA we’re likely to experience many years of what happens when government workers are practically free to enforce whatever rules and service standards they feel like. And to do so entirely individually for whatever legit or illegit reasons they want.
They got married in 1970 - the column said they lived together for a couple of years before that.
You are right. It was probably 1968 and there was still a general disapproval about cohabitation. At Penn in 1960 they still had arcane rules about women in the men’s dorms. Women, even students’ mothers, could visit only on Sundays between 2 and 5 and the door to the room had to be kept open. Also there was an 11 PM and a student who came in later had to sign in and too many sign-ins led to disciplinary action. But if a student got an off-campus apartment, there was no control.
But if my postman had refused to deliver for any unauthorized reason, I’d have called the office of my congressman. This can be remarkably effective.
Well, you also don’t know if there is more to the story (and there almost always is).
This was in a college town. When I was in college (which was in the 70s), it was not uncommon for apartments to be rented to two or more unrelated people. The mailman would insist that all people receiving mail have their name on the mailbox. In one place I rented with three other guys, we had to add a sticker for one of us who had a twelve-letter last name. In addition, some places had regulations that limited the number of people living at the same address. That is, you couldn’t have 4 people rent a 1BR apartment, for example.
So, perhaps the mailman knew that if they put two names on the mailbox that the landlord would know that two unrelated people were renting a 1BR which might get them evicted. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But, there is almost always more to the story that makes it make sense.
My dog barks / acts very differently if I walk up. vs. if a stranger walks past vs. a stranger walks past with one of those damned canines. You’d see she’s the sweetest thing if you walked up with me but mebbe not so much if you came up on your own.
Whether true or not, it’d be easy enough to say that your lump is vicious when they try to deliver mail; I doubt any supervisor would go out to verify on their own if you complained.