By Khalida Sarwari
Best mailman ever. The mailman of all mailmen. A gem of a human being. One of a kind. Irreplaceable.
Those are just a handful of the accolades that residents of the Las Palmas neighborhood in Sunnyvale have poured onto Salvador “Sal” Vasquez, surely in person and definitely in a petition that went around about a year and a half ago.
Photo courtesy of Sal Vasquez
In this photo, Sal Vasquez was about two-thirds of the way into his three-decade career in the U.S. Postal Service, most which was spent delivering mail to the residents of Sunnyvale’s Las Palmas neighborhood. The beloved mailman retired in December 2017.
That petition was circulated in protest of Vasquez potentially getting reassigned to a different block. But at the end of December, the 64-year-old Vasquez clocked in one last time, hanging up his battered sneakers that had taken him close to 10 miles a day as he stuffed no less than 370 mailboxes along his route.
Vasquez retired from the U.S. Postal Service at the end of December after nearly 33 years. Only now is it dawning upon him how strenuous his job really was: “That was a lot of walking, you know?”
Well, it wasn’t always walking he was doing; sometimes the job required light jogging and even some marathon running. Vasquez recalled a time when a dog he’d known—and lovingly petted—for eight years suddenly turned on him. He had reached over the gate to give the dog’s owner, an elderly woman holding a walker, her mail when her pet—Vasquez guesses it was a collie—jumped up and bit his hand, resulting in one of his nails completely coming off. As Vasquez tells it, the dog then managed to open the gate and chase him around the street.
Once the situation was diffused and Vasquez had a chance to recollect himself, ever the professional, he continued on his route, going to the hospital four hours later after he’d finished.
“I kept on going,” he said. “What the heck. The mail must go through, you know.”
Most days, it wasn’t dogs Vasquez found himself battling but traffic. The commute from Sunnyvale to his home in Hayward added up to nearly two hours some nights. That, along with the USPS scrambling his route, one that he’d claimed for 30 years—during which he saw entire generations grow up before his eyes—were enough to convince Vasquez to consider retirement.
It appears he has been settling into this new chapter of his life almost as well as he led his previous one as a postman. While he’s spent most of his retirement so far “mostly getting fat,” Vasquez said he’d eventually like to do a bit of traveling with his wife, a retired project manager in the telecommunications industry. The two have three adult children and four grandchildren.
“I have family in Hawaii talking me into moving there,” he said, with a laugh. “I try to go at least once a year. Now I have time to go for a month.”
That would be one heck of a life transformation for the retired letter carrier, but despite having the same route for three decades, Vasquez is no stranger to change. Born and raised in San Francisco, Vasquez worked as a pharmacy technician for about 10 years when an appendix surgery suddenly left him without a job.
“While I was recovering, the owner of the store told me he sold the business and I’d have to find a new job,” he recalled. “I had applied maybe a year before that (for the post office job) and it was just a coincidence that the doctor said I could start working again the same day the post office wanted me to report for work.”
That was more than 30 years ago and he hasn’t looked back. Now that Vasquez has closed that chapter of his life, there is just one thing he’ll miss: the people he served. And it seems they had just as much of an impact on him as he did on their lives.
“Especially the route I had, it was so incredible that they took me in,” he said. “I felt like I was a brother or a father to some of these people. Around every corner was a smile.”
Added Vasquez, “It’s really something I will never forget in my whole life.”
If that 2016 petition is any indication, many of the residents in the Las Palmas neighborhood won’t either.
“Sal knew my name since the day I was born and we still chat whenever I visit home, whether I see him at my parents’ home or somewhere else along his route,” wrote Travis McCleary, who now resides in Concord. “Who else can really say they remember their mailman?”
Through dinners, Starbucks gift cards, chocolates, cookies and bottles of wine, Las Palmas’ neighbors showed their favorite mailman they wouldn’t soon forget him. And Vasquez doesn’t plan on losing touch with them either.
“I know where they live,” he said, laughing.
Link:
Sal the (retired) Las Palmas mailman settles into his new life
