To the despair of his route families, Greenville letter carrier Eric Garofalo will retire today after nearly 38 years of 10 hour days, six days a week.
It may not be quite as renowned as Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, but Eric Garofalo is rocking his Beloved Mailman Farewell Tour in Greenville.
Festivities have included parties thrown by neighborhoods, a shower of gifts and cards, and even few bittersweet au revoirs at mail boxes along the route of a man whose presence customers say is so much a part of the community he is like extended family.
Garofalo has been the guest of honor at parties in Sedgely Farms, Angelesy, Limerick and finally Stonewold, where 60 people turned out Wednesday night in 90-degree heat to wish him well.
His wife, Annette, told one group, “It’s so sweet that you guys love him and he loves you, but this is not normal with your mailman.”
Garofalo has been the letter carrier for two decades in some of those neighborhoods, a primo route and one he spent years working to achieve.
He’s blessed with the gift of gab and a knack of finding commonality with other people.
People describe him as gregarious, but he thinks of it as making himself available to others.
“I’m a people person,” he said. “I mean, the only thing I ever won in high school was Best Personality.”
Garofalo also has a true civil servant’s heart and no problem going above and beyond the call of duty to help those to whom he makes 415 deliveries a day, six days a week and usually 10 hours a day.
He can reel off their addresses by memory and has most of their cell phone numbers, and they have his. He’s even taken calls from a beach while on vacation if one of them needed help.
Garofalo also has many of their garage door codes.
If he arrives at a house and sees packages delivered by other services sitting around, he’ll push them into garages to try to foil porch pirates.
It’s not really a part of his job, he said.
“But you know, I always say there are postal rules and then there’s my rules that I do on my route,” Garofalo says.
Mailman Eric Garofalo, right, with painter Karlis Adamsons who gifted him with two portraits at a retirement party Wednesday evening. Photo by Cathy Andriadis.
Making connections
The Newark resident started casually mentioning to customers two years ago that he likely would retire soon.
Stonewold resident Cathy Andriadis walks in the neighborhood every morning with a friend. Garofalo’s name often came up when they stopped to chat with other residents.
Inevitably, Andriadis said, whoever they were talking to would say they didn’t want Garofalo to retire.
That’s no slight to the U.S. Post Office, she said.
“But we developed such a great relationship with him, and as I said he was like extended family,” she said. “He was a part of the neighborhood.”
Garofalo paid attention to what was going on in the neighborhood and with families.
He delivers packages to the front door of the Andriadis’s door to make it easier for her husband, who uses a cane. He does the same for others.
“He’s a pillar of the community and looks out for each and every neighbor and does special touches for all of us,” said Christy Fleming, whose family lives along Garofalo’s route.
Garofalo noticed when her son’s high school team won the state tennis championship and asked how her son, James, did in his match. When he realized the family was planning a wedding, he offered congratulations to Barbara, the bride.
“He’s also just a curious, in a good way, and friendly person,” Fleming said.
Garofalo said he finds people interesting.
“All kinds of people,” he said. “And I’m not intimidated by somebody who has wealth or somebody who’s a politician. You know, to me, everybody’s the same. So I think I just navigate my world with just being able to communicate with anybody.”
That’s helped him become conversant in lots of topics, including politics, finance and, especially, retirement planning.
He also has his own interests, including brewing beer, barbecuing and rolling cigars, which he went to Honduras to learn.
Mailman Eric Garofalo tells Stonewold residents how much he’s enjoyed them and will miss them. Photo by Cathy Andriadis.
All of that is part of what inspires affection in others.
Scott and Michelle Foster bring Garofalo frozen Nic-o-Bolis from Nicola Pizza back from summer vacations at the Delaware beaches. He told them once he always ate them as a kid when his family went to the beach.
The Fosters appreciate Garofalo going out of his way to help them to do things like stop their mail when they’re out of town, putting packages at the door instead of the mailbox, and even keeping an eye out for important letters.
“And he’s just a nice guy,” she said.
If she passed his mail truck on the road in an area where it was safe to stop, she would. They’d chat for a few minutes.
An artist, she gave Garofalo one of her pastels and it now hangs in his house.
The Fosters already are making plans to go out to dinner with Garofalo and his wife in a few weeks.
Andriadis’s husband, Karlis Adamsons is a painter and as a retirement present, he created two portraits of Garofalo. One shows the mailman in a Hawaiian shirt with water in the background and the other shows him in his mail truck, with dogs climbing all over it.
Cathy Andriadis says the doggie portrait seemed to be the neighborhood favorite because it evoked so many memories of him giving treats he keeps in the truck to neighborhood dogs.
The portraits were the centerpiece of a gift table Wednesday night.
It included a bottle of each of his favorite bourbons, a party tub into which people could place a bottle of a favorite beer for Garofaloto enjoy in retirement, and a legal-sized box stuffed with retirement cards dropped off before or during the party.
One of the things mailman Eric Garofalo did that endeared him to his route customers was to leave packages too big for a mailbox at their doors.
Retiring young
Garofalo will formally retire today, June 28, running his last route of 37.5 years. Some residents plan to be at their mail boxes to say good-bye.
He will end a job he took as a college student because he thought it would be better to have a paycheck than pay for another class when he wasn’t sure what he wanted to study.
He grew up in Newark, graduating from Glasgow High School and enrolled at the University of Delaware, when he floundered because he didn’t really know what he wanted to do.
Garofalo dropped out and took the Post Office test before deciding to go back to school at Goldey Beacom College, still not knowing what he wanted to do.
Then the Post Office offered him a job.
“I kind of said, ‘You know what? I can’t see doing four years of school,’ so I took the job,” he said.
It was kind of a full circle moment for Garofalo.
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He remembers being asked in first grade what he wanted to be, and he said a mailman, because he really liked the family mailman.
He loved it from the start but a major appeal was the promise of a pension, and the chance to retire early and maybe have a second career after that.
Garofalo’s own parents hadn’t been able to retire.
His dad died while still on the job and his mom worked until she was about 70 and was diagnosed with cancer. She spent what should have been the start of retirement battling that disease but is still alive.
He started work as a floater in Trolley Square, filling in when the route letter carriers had a day off.
As he put in more time, he was able to climb the seniority rank to his current No. 4.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a lot of carriers to quit, but it also proved to the public what a vital role the U.S. Post Office has in society, Garofalo says.
Christy Fleming takes a farewell selfie with mailman Eric Garofalo.
No mailman drama
Garofalo says he doesn’t have any dramatic stories about his job.
He’s never delivered a baby, but he’s delivered cremains, he said.
He’s never rescued anyone from a fire, but he did walk into a Kennett Square store and realize the woman behind the counter was having a stroke. He stayed with her until 911 arrived and was sad to hear she died a few days later.
He’s aware that the outpouring of love and respect from his route is unusual today and is afraid it may stay that way.
Many people now don’t know their letter carriers, especially if they live in neighborhoods built in the last two decades, because Post Office rules require centralized mailboxes, he said.
That means the carriers don’t have a chance to know the residents either, he said.
He, however, does know his own mail carriers: Anthony Weeks works the route and his mother, Teresa Weeks, fills in for Anthony as floater.
After nearly 38 years, the 57-year-old Garofalo still loves the job.
He’s retiring partly because the Post Office is reinventing itself and benefits will change in the next year, and he wants to leave while he still qualifies for the current plan.
“I’m not really counting down because I’m kind of sad that I have to make this decision now,” he said.
At the same time, Garofalo said, “You know, how many people can retire at 57? Not a lot. And it’s not really retiring because I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I’m gonna find something to do. I can’t do nothing.
“So I’m not really retiring. I’m just not going to work for the Post Office.”
Betsy Price is a Wilmington freelance writer who has 40 years of experience, including 15 at The News Journal in Delaware.
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