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Karen Blackledge
Mail carrier braves elements on 7-mile downtown route
DANVILLE — Matt Scicchitano’s delivery bag is stuffed this time of year.
”The bag is a lot heavier. We have relays out in the boxes where we stop to reload. We put out more relays this time of year,” said the Danville carrier, who has been on the job for nearly 11 years.
On Dec. 14, or what is traditionally the busiest shipping day of the year for the Danville office, carriers delivered 1,033 parcels and nearly 61,000 letters. Abby Derck, officer-in-charge, expected the busiest delivery day to be Dec. 16 or 17.
The Danville office usually has a volume of 500 to 600 parcels and about 20,000 letters a day.
Scicchitano’s route covers Mill Street businesses and stops along West Mahoning and West Market streets for a walking distance of 7 miles daily. “I have 700 stops of possible deliveries a day,” he said. First-class mail and priority packages must be delivered that day, he said.
City carriers are supposed to be off the streets by 5 p.m., so they have a part-time carrier who helps out during the holidays when the regular carriers are working overtime.
Scicchitano started out with the Danville post office as a part-time employee, handling all the city routes, and then became a full-time carrier.
He comes from a line of postal employees. His late grandmother, Mary Kaczmarket, was the last postmaster in Natalie. His dad, Dennis, is retired from the Mount Carmel post office. His mother, Margaret, served as relief postmaster in Locust Gap. His sister, Megan Wilson, is Numidia’s postmaster.
“It has always been in the family, and there was shop talk around the dinner table when we were kids,” said Scicchitano, a Mount Carmel High School graduate who spent 1 1/2 years at Penn State. He worked at UPS and W&L; Subaru before getting the call for an interview at Danville’s Mill Street post office.
A Mount Carmel resident, he enjoys being outside and talking to the people along his route.
“When you are out there eight, nine or 10 hours a day, you get used to it and are dressed for it. It doesn’t bother me too much,” he said.
The worst part is when the wind is whipping around you, he said. He wears thermal layers and an insulated coat, gloves, a hat and a face mask if needed.
“I go inside to the businesses to deliver mail in the morning, and that gives me a little bit of a break early in the morning,” the 33-year-old said.
The holidays aren’t any more stressful. “There’s just so much more of the normal thing, and you work later hours. It’s still the same job. You know it will be like this. I don’t mind. We have good management in this office. Everybody’s job is getting everything out in time, and we all work together,” he said.
The only drawback to the long hours is getting home late in the evening to his wife, Mandy, and two sons.
While catalog and magazine deliveries have fallen off since the first week of December, he expects the letter volume to decrease through Dec. 24.
But after Christmas, there usually is an enormous surge in sale catalogs in January and February, he said.
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