LIMESTONE, Maine — With the thousands of military personnel and persons living and working at the Loring Air Force Base came postage and parcels from all over the world — and those packages were delivered by the dedicated staff of the Loring Post Office, including Coyle (Pete) Huntress.
In Loring’s heyday, Huntress and others working at the post office delivered mail to 1,800 units plus all the different squadrons.
Huntress spent the brunt of his 41-year career working at the Loring Post Office and formed close friendships with many who were stationed at the base. Having those friendships afforded the postal worker unprecedented opportunities … like one instance, where he was invited to fly on a KC-135 during an air-refueling mission for the B-52s and the fighters. Lying on his belly in the back of the plane, Huntress recalled with a smile how the planes flew up to the KC-135s refueling boom.
“The fighters were like little piglets coming up and flashing away,” Huntress explained, using his hands to mimic the motions of the aircrafts. “You laid on your belly in the back of the aircraft, there was a long boom that extended and thousands of gallons of fuel would pump in there in a matter of, what seemed to me, a few seconds,” Huntress described with enthusiasm, clearly still enjoying the adventure’s memory decades after the fact.
Though there were adventures and unique friendships, working at the Loring Post Office came with a lot of hard work and, depending on when the periodicals came out, a lot of heavy lifting.
“Time, Look, Life, Newsweek and all of those magazines, plus the newspapers from away,” Huntress remembered. Relay boxes were set up around the base to ease mail distribution, but an average mail bag for 50 houses would weigh 30 pounds or more, plus additional packages.
“We made deliveries on foot,” Huntress emphasized. “We didn’t have the vehicles like they do today.”
Delivering the mail at Loring and working the counter meant meeting thousands of folks from all over the country but sometimes, Huntress would bring the Post Office to the airmen.
The Caribou Air Force Station, right next to the Loring Air Force Base, was where the nuclear components were stored for the weapons; after background checks and securing the necessary clearances, Huntress would head over to the Caribou Air Force Station, or the 30 80th, on pay days to set up a mobile post office for the airmen.
“It was all underground; I would take the post office in a container over there to a secure day room and set up the post office,” he recalled. “They could buy stamps, money orders — anything they needed.”
Going over to the secure base where the bombs were kept may have been stressful to some, but it wasn’t for Huntress.
“That wasn’t stressful — not at 20-25 years old,” he said.
Huntress started with the post office right out of high school and while it did turn into a career, that wasn’t what he originally intended.
“I came out of high school and I needed a job, and Loring was just starting up in good shape, so I applied to the post office, took and passed the exams, and was hired as Christmas help on Dec. 20, 1954,” Huntress recalled.
From there he was hired as a substitute and then an indefinite substitute before becoming a regular postal employee — a position that he held until he retired in November of 1995.
It was almost the career that wasn’t, however. Huntress graduated from Fort Fairfield High School in 1954, and some of his friends were headed out to Detroit where they could make $5.50 per hour working in the auto industry. Joining them was tempting, but Huntress elected to go the postal route with it’s starting pay of $1.55 per hour.
Working at the Loring Post Office was a rewarding career for Huntress, who made life-long friends along the way — but he wasn’t the only one. His wife, Joanne, and his children made friends with folks stationed at the base, and they all still keep in touch.
