Country Mailman

Tune in every week to read about the adventures of Buck Buchanan, fictional country mailman, delivering mail out of Starz, Texas. He takes his job seriously and knows that customers count on him to deliver every piece of mail entitled to them. He is all about customer service. With a willing ear and a helping hand, Buck Buchanan goes the extra mile.

*  *  * 

I sang along with the melody playing on the radio, just as loud as if I was singing in church. I don’t have any parcels to  deliver for at least two hours and that makes any mailman happy. And today is check day. Two people have already met me at their mailbox, glad to get the envelopes. Happy folks tend to visit and since the mail is light today, I don’t mind spending a little extra time catching up.

When I saw the figure walking along the side of the road, I exhaled sadly. “Aw, Essie.”

Driving up beside her slowly so as not to frighten the lady, I leaned over and yelled out the window. “Need a ride, Essie?”

The silver-headed woman was dressed in a blue nightgown and wore terrycloth slippers that were coated with dirt. The back of her hair looked as if she had slept hard and sparse tufts spiked in all directions. She peered at me suspiciously through black eyes that still sparkled even though age had taken the rest of the sparkle from her life.

“Do I know you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m your mailman. I played basketball with your son, John.” I shrugged. “Many years ago,” I added, under my breath so she didn’t hear.

“I’m going to the café. Edna needs me,” she said as if she had never asked the question.

“Climb in. I’ll take you.”

She looked at me again, still standing by the window. “Do I know you?” she asked again.

I shook my head. “No, ma’am. You don’t know me. Can I take you to the café?”

“Will you take me to the café?”

I smiled slightly. “Yes, ma’am. I sure will.”

After ushering the older woman in the front seat, I hesitated to call the sheriff’s office to let them know I’d found her – seemed blatantly patronizing and even though the lady didn’t understand what went on around her, I just couldn’t do it. I’d call when I got to the café. It was closer than her daughter’s house.

After leaving Essie to drink coffee with the cotton gin crew taking a morning break, I called the sheriff’s office, feeling like an informer. Essie escaped several times a month, but rarely made it past the front drive. Her daughter had installed all kinds of alarms, but clearly, the old lady sidestepped them all this morning.

Essie Kling is a legend. Not known to many, she was a member of WASP. Essie didn’t know when the group was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal because her mind had already been lost to the unknown, but the ones who knew her appreciated the latent honor. Her daughter has the duplicate bronze medal sitting in the glass cabinet beside the front door. Only one gold medal was made, but all the members of WASP received a replica – at the time only a third of the group was estimated to be alive.

In 1943, Essie asked her father for five hundred dollars so she could get a pilot’s license. It was a lot of money at that time. She didn’t know how her dad managed but he gave it to her and she learned to fly. The license was a requirement for applying to the Women Airforce Service Pilots program and Essie wanted to see the world. She also wanted to serve her country during the war and that was the only way she could figure out how to do it.

Since her uncle worked for the railroad, he let her ride on the caboose down to Sweetwater, where she then hitched a ride out to the airfield. All the applicants had to get to the Texas training site on their own and she was lucky enough to live only a hundred miles away. Five foot, two inches was the minimum required height so she stuffed socks under her heels in her shoes to add an inch. Approximately one thousand young women finished the program, Essie being one of them. They weren’t military; they were considered civil servant employees. The program was instituted to relieve men pilots so they could participate in the war, leaving routine flight jobs in the United States to women. Thirty-eight of the participants were killed during the short two-year program in either training or routine flights and each time, their cohorts pitched in money to send the bodies home to families.

Essie’s first job was to ferry planes from manufacturing plants to military bases in the states. During one trip over Nebraska, smoke poured into the cockpit. Instructed to bail out, she hesitated because her parachute was too big. She very likely would have shot out of it and been killed, anyway. Staying with the plane that was only smoking, not flaming, she made an emergency landing and discovered some wires had been crossed, causing the trouble. A few hours later, she was back up in the air, delivering the aircraft as planned.

Next, she towed targets behind a plane for artillery gunners to practice their shooting, using live ammunition. Perhaps because she had proven herself as being dedicated and competent, she began to fly B-26 and B-29 bombers from manufacturing facilities to air bases. Essie said it was the grandest feeling she ever knew. That alone was worth all the hard work and five hundred dollars she repaid her father.

As the war began to wane, the program was disbanded and Essie came home to Starz. She had not seen the world, but she had seen a lot of the United States. And she brought a soldier home with her, settling on the family farm and raising three sons and a daughter.

Records of the WASP program were labeled classified and sealed when the war ended. But when the Air Force began admitting women as pilots, the role of WASP was re-examined and Congress granted veteran status to the participants in 1977. Two years later, the pilots were awarded honorable discharges and finally in 2010, Congress recognized the valuable service the women played in World War II. The group as an entity was issued the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor that is bestowed. Now, there’s a museum dedicated to the WASP located in Sweetwater, Texas. It houses a little known story of the first American woman air force. I know about it because I live in Starz where Essie Kling will always be a legend to me. Some people you meet in your life are unforgettable. Whenever I see her, I picture a tiny, young woman in the pilot’s seat of a B-29 bomber. What a woman!