PRIVATE MAIL COMPANY DELIVERS : BOATS SERVE DETROIT RIVER SAILORS.

Byline: Keith Bradsher The New York Times

Charles F. Wundrach gave the black metal wheel a twist and gently steered this 40-foot tugboat alongside the towering, 700-foot-long iron ore freighter steaming up the Detroit River between the steel mills of Detroit and a concrete factory in Windsor, Ontario.

Two sailors waiting 15 feet overhead at the freighter's gangway, the door-size entrance in the black steel hull near the stern, quickly lowered a red, white and blue metal bucket on a rope.

Charles P. Weiss, a 25-year-old deck hand on the Hogan, dumped a gray canvas bag of mail into the bucket and tied it to the rope. After trying unsuccessfully to persuade the sailors to buy a couple of newspapers, he motioned for them to pull the bucket back up. Wundrach, 58, steered the tugboat clear, and when the freighter's horn boomed acknowledgment of the mail delivery, he gave a pair of parting toots from the tugboat's squeaky horn.

So ended another delivery on one of the world's most unusual mail routes, where high waves and reckless pleasure boaters pose more of a risk than icy sidewalks and vicious dogs.

The half-mile-wide river is the passageway for ships from Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair that are going to and from Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and the Atlantic Ocean. For 122 years, the J.W. Westcott Co., a family business on the American side of the river, has been hauling mail to and from the passing freighters, the only civilian service of its kind in the nation. The Hogan began to ply the route this spring.

Great Lakes freighter sailors alternate 60 days afloat with 30 days ashore. The arrival of the mail boat is one of the highlights of every trip up and down the lakes, said Gary D. Fuller, a 43-year-old assistant freighter engineer.

``Everyone's looking forward to love letters from their girlfriends, their wives or whatever, maybe even a package,'' Fuller said as he waited for a mail boat to take him out to join a freighter after his shore leave. ``It's an event. It's part of the way of life.''

Sailors sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, even when off duty, to be on hand when the mail arrives.

``It's a question, what time is the mail boat?'' Fuller said. ``They want to be up.''

The Hogan and its aging sister ship, the J.W. Westcott II, are on duty 24 hours a day and seven days a week, from early April until the river freezes in mid-December. Freighters notify the river post office by radio an hour before passing the mail boat dock.

The post office consists of the two boats and a white, cinder-block building where mail is sorted into slots for each freighter. The post office has its own ZIP code, 48222, and is operated under a contract from the U.S. Postal Service. Navy vessels also have their own ZIP codes and get mail deliveries at sea.

The river post office delivers 400,000 packages and letters by boat each year for the same rates customers on shore pay. According to the Postal Service, the cost of the contract here is roughly comparable to the cost of residential delivery by letter carriers.

The Westcott Co. has evolved considerably since John Ward Westcott founded the business in 1874 by rowing to passing ships.

But in the old days, the company played an even more important role. Before radios, shipping lines relied on telegraph messages from the company here to keep track of when their vessels passed through the Detroit River on trips from the iron ore mines and timber operations of northern Michigan to the factories on the Lake Erie shore of Ohio.

The mail service began as a sideline, when families paid to have letters carried out to passing sailors. ``We would charge as much as 25 cents in those days, and made quite a killing, I suppose,'' said James M. Hogan, the 40-year-old general manager of the company, who is a great-grandson of the founder.

Recognizing a business opportunity, the Postal Service set up its own, competing boat service in 1895 and ran it until 1948, when it signed a contract for the family to take over all mail deliveries.

The Detroit River was crowded then with small freighters carrying large crews. In the early 1950s, the boat delivery service was handling a million pieces of mail each season for sailors who, before union contracts changed, stayed aboard their ships almost continuously for the Lakes' eight ice-free months, with little or no shore leave.

The development in the 1960s of immense, highly automated ore ships, up to a fifth of a mile long, drastically reduced the number of sailors on the Great Lakes. And more recently, some sailors have begun using cellular telephones to stay in touch with their families. So the volume of mail has fallen steadily.

But the boat service here has stayed in business, partly by handling many more Express Mail, Federal Express and United Parcel Service overnight packages. Many packages are full of pay stubs, because shipping lines no longer send paymasters to the docks to hand cash to the sailors.