‘Here comes orange flash.’ What was mail delivery in rural SLO County like 40 years ago?
Cholame was ghosted by the U.S. Postal Service in August 1994.
Type the former post office’s zip code, 93431, into the USPS’s zip code lookup site and you’ll get this message: “You did not enter a valid ZIP Code.”
Economics have closed small post offices throughout San Luis Obispo County, Harmony Post Office closed in 2011, and the Halcyon Store and Post Office is set to shut its doors in March.
The loss of Cholame’s post office was also a major one.
As reporter Phil Dirkx once wrote, “Downtown Cholame never was very big, but now it is in danger of getting even smaller.”
Surrounded by vast Hearst Ranch, the Cholame region has remained largely unbroken. It’s had a handful of ownership changes since the Mexican land grant was given to Mauricio Gonzales in 1844.
The regional name came from a Salinan or Yokut village first shown as Cholaam. Historian Mark Hall-Patton lists nine different spellings but was unable to trace the meaning in his book “Memories of the Land.”
The Cholame post office was founded in 1873 or 1874.
The post office was located in a recycled road maintenance shack, hauled to the site on horse skids in 1933.
An August 1981 story said outgoing letters were collected in a Kleanbore Shur Shot Shell box beneath the mail drop.
When I first saw the post office in March 1991, unused post office boxes were full of spiderwebs.
One of the reasons the Cholame post office closed three years later was upgrading the Depression-era shack to modern standards would have cost $40,000.
When Lilly Grant was appointed postmaster in 1978, it was estimated that the Cholame post office only did $2,500 a year in business.
The post office, a small elementary school and gas station have all been demolished since then, leaving only the Jack Ranch Cafe. It’s located next to the James Dean memorial, which was built in 1977.
Reporter Donna Sanks wrote this story about the rural mail delivery that was based at the Cholame Post Office in Aug. 27, 1981.
Here comes ‘orange flash’
Tom Rutowski’s 1979 Ford Fairmont bounces along the road, turning off now and then to deliver groceries to widely scattered ranch houses.
But Tom Rutkowski does more than deliver necessities to the isolated folks in the North County countryside.
He delivers the mail.
And the sight of the 34-year-old red-bearded postman’s bright orange Fairmont rolling up the driveway is a welcome one to folks who may not see another visitor for days.
Sometimes Rutkowski covers the 58-mile mail route without meeting another car. And one patron has to drive 13 miles to retrieve his mail from his roadside mailbox. There are some residents on the route he’s never seen.
The hour-long drive takes Rutkowski to a perch where he can see the Sierra Nevada in the winter, across the San Andreas fault and into Kern County.
Rutkowski has been delivering mail in Cholame “on and off for about seven years.”
But the deadlines on the Shandon Star Route don’t stop him from delivering a box of groceries or pulling up a kitchen chair to have a sip of iced tea.
Rutkowski’s customers understand why he can make a leisurely stop on his noon route and still get to Shandon on schedule. They have nicknamed his mail car the “orange flash.”
“I’ve got a groove in the road,” Rutkowski said during a recent drive down his mail path.
The dips and curves in the Cholame Hills are memorized now. So on quiet days Rutkowski pulls out a book, usually about positive thinking, positions it in front of the steering wheel, and reads while he drives.
He moved to San Miguel from Chicago about nine years ago when he left the city to find a quieter life.
“I closed my eyes, put my finger on a map and this is where I ended up.”
Rutkowski wants to make a fortune, retire young and travel.
The mail route is one step on the ladder he expects to climb with positive thinking and business skills he learned since he moved west.
For now, Rutkoiwski said he delivers mail in Cholame and Shandon and serves as a business consultant at night to earn extra income.
Rutkowski begins and ends his daytime job in Paso Robles. He delivers mail in Shandon in the morning and Cholame in the afternoon.
For that, he is paid $20,000 a year.
Rutkowski is not employed by the U.S. Postal Service, but has a contract for the route. He spends about $4,000 a year for gas, and uses his own time and skills to repair the Fairmont.
The well-worn Ford speeds out of the Cholame Post Office at noon each day. Rutkowski usually sits on the right hand side of the car to reach the mailboxes, and maneuvers the brakes, gas and steering wheel from there.
As the Ford rumbles down Bitterwater Valley Road, Rutkowski explains that his first delivery is eight miles from the post office which is located on Highway 46.
Mudslides in the winter sometimes force Rutkowski to detour around Bitterwater, named for the lime and sulphur-filled water that lies beneath the Cholame Hills.
The route takes him past crumbling adobe buildings, two closed schools, and some scrub oak trees.
“At harvest time, I get some competition from the grain trucks and once in a while they sprinkle me with some seed from an airplane,” he said.
Most days, Rutkowski has a rendezvous with two deer in front of and abandoned house and plays “dodge ’em” with the coyotes.
Tires rumble as the Ford crosses cattle guards, the metal contraptions that discourage cows from wandering out of the pasture.
They interrupt the blacktop as one ranch ends and another begins.
The Twisselman family mailboxes, three of them, stand along the road, and Rutkowski said it’s not unusual to fill them all.
The rush to get the mail out comes to a casual halt at Leanore Taussig’s house on Bitterwater Road.
Grandma Taussig, as Rutkowski calls her, is in her 80s and confined to a wheelchair. Rutkowski often delivers the groceries she has ordered from the store in Shandon.
“I think he’s wonderful,” Grandma Taussig said about Rutkowski.
“I’m the only one who’ll come up and see her every day,” Rutkowski said.
His charge for grocery deliveries depends on the load.
“When Eleanor Still makes tacos for the ranchhands on 2,200 acres, my trunk is really full of lettuce and tomatoes...”
The Stills’ ranch is one where Rutkowski deliveries the mail right to the kitchen table.
“If she is not there, I sign for her mail and open the refrigerator to get a cold glass of water.”
The Carter Grade on Annette Road is the spot where Rutkowski sometimes stops for a quick cup of coffee.
In the winter, when the haze is gone, he can see Bakersfield and the Sierra Nevada from the top of the grade.
Coffee done, the race begins again to Cholame where Posmaster Lilly Grant postmarks the outgoing letters Rutkowski gathers along the route.
Usually, he collects less than a half-dozen.
