On a sunny spring afternoon, Roy Prince Jr. drives a square white mail truck along some of Buffalo Grove’s residential streets.
He stops at each curbside mailbox and leans out an open window to insert that customer’s delivery. Over the course of a few hours, he repeats the motions 364 times.
“I’m happy being out like this,” says Prince, one of 56 carriers for the Buffalo Grove post office. “It’s peaceful. I like being on my own, and the hours are good.”
Prince’s routine varies slightly. He delivers oversized packages to the front doors of his customers, and if the contents are perishable, he rings the bell and waits for a response. To reach mailboxes that have fallen from their posts or dangle from broken ones–as three are on this day–he leans even further. Some customers leave outgoing mail for him to take back to the post office.
“I try to get there at the same time (every day), but that’s hard because the (volume) is always different,” he says. “I try to give good service and not make any mistakes.”
Prince, 49, joined the Wheeling post office 29 years ago. At that time, the branch served Wheeling and Buffalo Grove. When Buffalo Grove got its own post office in 1992, he was permanently assigned there. He has the highest seniority among the Buffalo Grove carriers. He has had his present route for 17 years.
“I’ve never seen this man down,” says Carl Smith, supervisor of customer services. “He’s one of the most upbeat human beings I’ve met in my life. He’s a wonderful man. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like him. I don’t ever get any complaints from his route. He does a complete job.”
“He’s an excellent employee, works well with customers and always has service in mind,” Postmaster Michael Wingstrom says.
The post office, 255 N. Buffalo Grove Rd., serves about 17,500 residential and business addresses within the village.
The carriers begin their shifts at 7 a.m. and spend the next three or four hours sorting the day’s deliveries. A sorting machine handles flat items that have bar codes printed beneath the addresses and meet certain size limitations. The carriers do the rest.
The machine, which the post office installed about two years ago, cuts roughly an hour from a carrier’s sorting time, Prince says.
When the sorting is finished, the carriers load their trucks and head for their routes.
The carriers deliver letters, bills, catalogs, newspapers, magazines and small packages that include food and live plants. Among the more unusual items Prince has delivered are live crickets. He could tell what they were by the chirping noises coming from the boxes.
“I’ve had people order them for their pet snakes,” he says with a shrug.
Mail volume is the highest immediately after the Christmas season because of income-tax forms and sale catalogs and fliers, Prince says. Volume is the lowest in the summer.
He enjoys the summer heat, but says he must be especially careful driving then because children often play in the street.
“I don’t like the winters, but I’ve been through 29 of them, so I guess they’re not that bad,” he says.
Prince spends about four hours a day behind the wheel. He has had one minor accident, and the truck has broken down three times.
The accident occurred about a dozen years ago. He was driving along Dundee Road when another driver pulled in front of him. Prince hit the car. He stopped, but the driver sped away.
“I think he didn’t have any insurance,” Prince surmises. The mail truck was not damaged.
When the truck breaks down, Prince knocks on customer doors until he finds someone home and asks to use the phone to call the post office. A different truck is brought to him, and the disabled one is towed for repair.
The carrier regrets that his mail is delivered late on those days. “But it’s not too bad in this many years to have happened” only a few times.
Another on-the-job hazard is dogs. For the first seven years of his career, Prince had two walking routes in Wheeling. Dogs were a major reason for his shift to a driving route, he says.
While he was delivering mail in Wheeling about 20 years ago, a German shepherd bit him on the leg and trapped him on a customer’s porch. Prince sprayed the dog with pepper spray, which irritated the animal long enough for the carrier to make his getaway. Prince was not seriously hurt.
Prince was born on Chicago’s Northwest Side. He lived there until age 7, when he moved with his family to Wheeling. He was among the first graduates of Wheeling High School in 1966. He attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale for two years and then returned to Wheeling to look for full-time employment. When he heard the post office was hiring, he applied and was hired.
After a year on the job, Prince was drafted into the Army. He enlisted instead and served much of his tour as an orderly in Mannheim, West Germany. He then returned to the post office.
In 1974, one of Prince’s brothers set him up on a blind date with the woman who would become his wife. He asked her during their first meeting if she was a Cubs fan and she said yes. Romance soon followed and the two married the next year. Roy and Donna Prince had three children who are 17, 14 and 12. They lived in several northwest suburban locations before moving to Cary eight years ago. Donna Prince died in 1995 of kidney failure.
“This is a good job,” Prince says. “All my customers are nice and I like working with all the people (at the post office). I get along with everybody real well.”
