Signed, sealed, final delivery for Lori Cantrell
Lori Cantrell, who has provided first-class service to customers of the Calistoga Post Office for more than 35 years, will retire on Wednesday.
A fixture at the post office, Cantrell often works six days a week, assisting customers with everything from PO box rentals to passport renewals and sharing her tricks of the trade for saving money on shipping and mailing expenses.
Over the decades, she has built her reputation as the friendly face behind the front desk, winning the hearts of many patrons.
“I like to think of my customers as friends, because they usually come in with a cheery smile,” Cantrell said. “Though, if they’re having a bad day, they can vent on me; I don’t mind.”
Pianist Larry Vuckovich has frequented the post office regularly since moving to town in the early 2000s. With Cantrell, he said, he knows the parcels he drops off to mail to his family in Montenegro are in good hands.
“Not to be partial, but I always wait for her to come to the window,” Vuckovich said. “She knows all the details; she is always so technically correct and accurate. Lori is the best.”
When there’s no one else waiting in line, the two movie buffs exchange notes about the latest film noirs and musicals they’ve seen.
Calistogan Millie Pease, who has known Cantrell for decades, credits her with fostering a positive atmosphere at the office.
“I just think Lori seems to set the tone of trying to help in any way she can,” Pease said. “She always goes the extra mile to give advice, and she’s just very knowledgeable.”
For Cantrell, her career assisting the post office’s consistent flow of clients has been a childhood dream come true.
A shy girl, often referred to as her twin sister’s shadow, Cantrell would run when she saw the mail carriers approach her home, watching them from afar as they delivered the mail.
“I always wanted to be a schoolteacher or a mail carrier; I don’t know why,” she said. “I like to help people with their problems. And even though I’m terribly shy, I like to interact with people.”
After graduating from Vintage High School in Napa, she worked at Chuck E. Cheese, where her favorite task was to dress as the company’s iconic anthropomorphic rat mascot and greet children.
She married Gary Cantrell, a truck driver and a Calistoga native, and they moved north to town. In 1989, ready for a new career after years as a stay-at-home mom, she applied for a job as a mail clerk at the Calistoga Post Office. She was committed from the get-go.
On Oct. 18, a day after the Loma Prieta Earthquake, she was scheduled to be fingerprinted for the job at the U.S. Postal Service distribution center in Oakland. In the aftermath of the disaster, she and her husband hopped in the car with their three young daughters and navigated around the collapsed freeways and rubble to complete the background check. Her first official day on the job was April 21, 1990.
A year later, Cantrell became a mail carrier. Fulfilling her childhood dream, she would also do everything from initiating welfare checks to staying with young school-age kids who were locked out of their homes and waiting for their parents.
“You get to know people on the very outskirts of their lives,” she said. “For example, you see the baby shoes on the front porch. Then you see the toddler shoes. Then the teenager shoes. And then, one day, no shoes.”
She was assigned the downtown route for 13 years, before transferring back to the mail room in 2004, due to back problems.
During her tenure, Cantrell has seen a revolving door of more than a dozen postmasters and officers in charge, saw the agency’s shift from hand-sorting mail to automated machine-sorting and filled in for stints at the Napa, Rutherford and St. Helena post offices when needed.
She’s been chased down her Spring Street route by territorial geese, scrambled to evacuate all the mail from the office during the Tubbs and Glass fires, and stood aghast in the sorting room as a woman drove a sedan straight through the west wall of the building – and then immediately back out through the hole she created as if nothing had happened.
“I’ve done about everything you can do here,” she said. “It doesn’t really feel like it’s been that long; it has flown by.”
Howard Fisher, a mail carrier since 2002, said Cantrell is known by her colleagues, many of whom she trained, for her consistency, her institutional knowledge of all things related to the post office, and for making a point to bake everyone in the office a cake on their birthday.
“There’s nobody like Lori. She is an anchor. She’s always got a smile. She’s always personable, always helpful,” said Fisher. “I doubt she’s made any enemies. She’s one of those people who never rubs anyone the wrong way – and that’s not contrived, it’s natural.”
Cantrell, who moved with her husband and kids to Hidden Valley more than 20 years ago so they could buy a house, said she still considers Calistoga home. When she attends Calistoga High School reunions with her husband and his siblings, all graduates, Cantrell said she is often mistaken for an alum.
“Once at a reunion a man came up to me,” Cantrell recalled. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you, what class did you graduate?’ I said, ‘I didn’t graduate from Calistoga, my husband did.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, I know you from somewhere.’ I said, ‘Yes, you do, you know me from the post office.’”
When she officially hangs up her blue uniform next week, Cantrell will make time for old and new hobbies, which include planting her first-ever vegetable garden, attending Renaissance fairs with her twin sister and continuing to care for her father who lives in Napa. She will also begin work on some new period costumes – she’s now sewing a 14th century Italian Renaissance dress.
As much as Cantrell is known in town for her friendly disposition, she’s equally known for dressing in her intricately sewn gowns on Halloween and special occasions. She was Princess Leia to commemorate the Star Wars 30th anniversary stamps issued in 2007, she donned a Scarlett O’Hara-inspired green curtain dress for the Civil War sesquicentennial stamp release in 2011, and she swapped out her uniform for a 1880s Bustle Era dress complete with opera gloves on her final day as a mail carrier in 2004.
“Any excuse to wear something other than my uniform,” she said.
Even in retirement, Cantrell said she will continue her tradition of participating in the annual Lighted Tractor Parade, walking alongside the decorated mail truck, dressed in an illuminated, holiday-themed costume.
Cantrell was unsure whether she’ll have time to dress up for her final day of work; her well-wishers will have to drop by the post office on Wednesday to find out.
