She’s Put Stamp On Clark Fork Over 36 Years

Clark Fork residents will gather today at the Methodist Fellowship Hall to pay tribute to retiring Postmaster Pat Derr.

“I always said they’d bury me down there under the mailboxes,” Pat said with a laugh. But after 36 years behind the counter, her hip has given out and she’s decided to retire.

“I’ll miss seeing everyone,” said Pat, “and knowing who’s having a baby, who’s not, and who’s doing what. It’s amazing what people come in and discuss with you while they’re buying stamps.”

Clark Fork regulars, including Charlie Campbell, 89, also will miss Pat.

“I come up every day and chatter with her,” said Charlie, who like many others appreciates Pat’s cheerful, friendly smile, genuine affection and involvement with the community.

Pat started life in Cabinet, Idaho, the third of four sisters. Born on St. Patrick’s Day to an Irish mother, she and her sisters grew up packing water, pitching hay, gathering eggs, splitting wood, weeding the garden and doing a multitude of other chores on the family homestead.

Before Pat started seventh grade, the Fields moved to Clark Fork to be closer to their father’s job on the railroad and Clark Fork High School.

“Somebody has to show you the light,” said Pat and gives credit to teacher Angie Jeffers, who taught bookkeeping and typing, for getting her interested in developing the skills that later benefited her long career at the post office.

In 1950, Pat graduated from Clark Fork High School. She took the post office exam in 1951 and started as a clerk in a wooden frame structure with a false front, situated near the train station.

In those days, the train brought mail three times a day but only stopped twice. They took the outgoing mail on board with a “catcher pouch,” but in order to get the incoming mail off the moving train, “they opened the train door and pushed out the sack of mail,” said Pat, “and the wind would suck it right back under the train.”

One of her early jobs was picking up mail that the train had run over.

“One time when the welfare checks were in the pouch we had the welfare recipients helping us,” Pat said. “And everyone was always sure they had a gift on that train and it went into the river.”

In 1953, the postmaster, Ethel Nowlin, purchased a log cabin where she lived in the back and did post office business in the front. In 1965, the federal post office leased and occupied the present cinder block building on the corner of Main Street and Third across from the log cabin. Derr has been official postmaster of the “new” building for the past 12 years.

She has seen plenty of changes.

“It’s so streamlined now, compared to then,” she said.

With the building of the new Cabinet Gorge Dam in the ‘50s, “we were insanely busy,” Pat recalled.

In those days before Federal Express and United Parcel Service became household words, the post office, railroad freight and Freightways Truck were the only means of getting anything out here.

“It was unbelievable the stuff that came every day through the post office,” she remembered.

And in those days they had half as many boxes as now, but five times as much general delivery.

Today Clark Fork has 496 boxes, “all rented with a waiting list,” said Pat.

There also is a highway contract route delivering mail to 125 rural boxes, and another delivery planned for Mosquito Creek Road.

Pat also recalled the days when postmaster Nowlin left in the winter.

“Roland and I lived in their house in back of the post office,” she said. “That was after we had kids too.”

Pat and Roland have two children, Darrell and Steve, and two grandchildren, Staci and Jennifer. Darrell and Steve both live in Clark Fork and work in the construction business started by Roland’s father. Pat also works in the family business, spending most of Saturday doing the books, a job she plans to continue.

“We laugh about it,” said Pat, referring to the fact that she and Roland bought a house across the street from where Roland grew up and around the block from where Pat lived when the family moved to Clark Fork from Cabinet.

“We call ourselves big adventurers.”

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MEMO: Susan Saxton D’Aoust is a free-lance writer and author who lives in Clark Fork. Panhandle Pieces appears every Saturday. The column is shared among several North Idaho writers.