By Susanne Beck
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” So goes the well-known motto of the United States Postal Service. But in the case of 63-year-old Shawn Lamminen recently retired mail carrier for Charles Street and neighboring enclaves, the adage is even more impressive. “Not even six-hour round-trip commutes, twelve-hour shifts, and upwards of six workdays a week, could keep this employee from completing his job, with grace, with charm, and generally with a smile on his face, even after arriving most days at least a few minutes early.”
For most of the 36 years he worked for the post office, Shawn carried the mail along Charles Street and a few of the side streets off it — Charles River Square and West Hill Place in particular. He would leave his Cape Cod home before dawn. He got back after dark. According to Eduardo Ferreira, his most recent supervisor at the Federal Office Building in Government Center, most days Shawn beat his 7:30 a.m. start by at least fifteen minutes. Almost every workday, for three decades. On March 31, his last day on the job, he showed up on time, too.
“They don’t make him like that anymore,” says Ferreira. During Ferreira’s first week on the job, Shawn happened to be on vacation. “I could always count on him, no matter what,” Ferreira says. He started using Shawn as the example for other carriers. Be punctual. Care about your work. Fill in for times when the office might be short-staffed (a more frequent occurrence given funding shortfalls). Ferreira notes that it would have been so much easier for Shawn to transfer to a route closer to home, but he didn’t. He liked Charles Street and more to the point, the liked he friends he had made there.
How much they liked him back was on full display on a Friday at the end of March, when seemingly the entire neighborhood — shop owners, residents, hangers-on from Charles River Square and West Hill Place — turned out to fete him. The party had been quietly conspired for months by Ali Ringenburg of the Sloane Gallery, with help from Jack and Cassie Gurnon of Charles Street Supply, Dave Poutre of Dave’s Fine Framing, and a neighbor from Charles River Square. The Gurnon’s grilled hot dogs on the sidewalk in front of the gallery. Someone procured Shawn’s favorite beer. Dave Poutre set up a camera and printed posters of Shawn photoshopped onto a sunny beach — a private joke about a man who, for seven months of every year, was openly less than thrilled about the weather he had to work in. The party started at 4:30 in the afternoon. People were still lingering hours later, in the chill and dark that is Boston in late March.
Almost anyone along the street who got to know him over the years will tell you that Shawn is a bit of a paradox. “Can we really say he was pleasant?” asks Dave Poutre, who hosted Shawn in the chair at the back of his framing shop for two decades’ worth of breaks. “A lot of times he was miserable,” he laughs. Then he pauses. “I didn’t blame him,” he adds. For nearly thirty years, Shawn complained about the cold, the wind, the rain, the snow, and the next day showed up to walk through more of it. “He still had a smile for us,” Poutre says. “He still made it in.”
He had only a few stops where he might linger. Dave’s Fine Framing for conversation and a brief sit. The barbershop down the block. The Charles Street post office but just for a bathroom break. “He never stayed longer,” observes one of his peers there. Charles Street Supply for the mail handoff — “he’d always joke that the checks were on top,” says Jack Gurnon – and for a quick pat of the store cat. Starting in November, he’d also ask Gurnon the same question, almost daily: “Jack, you doing the hot dogs today?” The answer was always no, Shawn — except, of course, on the one day a year (Christmas Eve) when it was yes. And on that day, as every day, the carrier could be relied upon, at that time to eat two or three franks and to hang around. Shawn would also frequent the Sloane Gallery, where Ali says she met him fourteen years ago, starting a conversation that never stopped until he stepped down. “It’s pretty bizarre not having him on the street anymore,” she reflects today. “He was somewhere between our weatherman and our sportscaster,” she chuckles.
Baseball talk was constant — the Red Sox, the Cape Cod Baseball League, the trips he took with his college buddies to historic stadiums around the country. Yes, there were other topics dear to his heart: his daughter, his cat, his dog, the gallery owner’s cat, his favorite Halloween candy, what the weather was about to do. But he always returned to the stadiums, where he loved to spend what little free time he had. Ali remembers that the few times he went on vacation, the relief at his return was almost comic: “It was like, oh my gosh, thank God things are back to normal,” she laughed. He knew every name on the route — given names, business names, the nicknames in between and rarely if ever mixed them up. When something addressed to Ali personally ended up in the wrong mailbox at 75 Charles, it found its way back through Shawn, who’d quietly correct the error.
His connection at Crush, the small Charles Street boutique that Laura Ayers and her business partner Rebecca opened in 2007, the relationship goes back to when both women were 25 and just getting started. “It was nice to have this constant who was always there,” Laura says nostalgically. “It was very comforting to have him.” When Shawn’s wife Lisa was pregnant with their daughter Autumn, Laura and Rebecca knew about it. They heard more about Autumn as she grew up, from high school to college applications, then a nursing program. And Shawn watched Laura’s and Rebecca’s lives unfold in turn: single to married, married to children, the boutique they opened in their mid-twenties becoming the successful multi-site business they run today. He affectionately referred to them as his “Sex and the City girls” early on. But in the thank-you card he wrote them after the retirement party, he updated their status, calling them “powerful businesswomen.”
What Shawn is going to do with all the time he has now, no one — including, possibly, Shawn — seems entirely certain. When Laura asked him on his last Friday what he planned to do on Monday morning, given that he’d been getting up at 4 or 4:30 a.m. for the better part of three decades, his answer came quickly: “Oh, probably still do the same.” There has been talk of a one-day-a-week job somewhere on the Hill, inspired by a formerly retired worker who now works as a bell hop at the Whitney. There are already baseball trips on the calendar including the college world series. And thankfully, there will be Autumn at Crush, an easy excuse to return to Charles Street whether he plans to come or not.
In the meantime, ask almost anyone along Charles Street and they will note that there is a gaping hole in his absence. “It’s pretty bizarre not having him on the street anymore,” Ali Ringenburg notes. “He made a huge impact on everyone on Charles Street, on Charles River Square on West Hill Place.” Jack Gurnon adds wistfully, “I can’t remember a mail carrier before him.” Dave Poutre gets right to the point. “I miss him,” he says, twice, in the span of a minute. “We miss him.”