The Chicago post office scandal.

For Ormer C. Rogers, Jr., the road to Kansas City was paved with good intentions. Not that Kansas City is hell, but it is the place where Ormer Rogers--the Chicago area's top postal official--was sent after he decided to get a handle on just how bad mail service was in Chicago's five long-troubled north lakefront postal districts.

You may have heard about Chicago's mail problems once they became a nationally publicized headache for the post office. What you might not know is that the chain of events that helped sink Ormer Rogers was set in motion by a disgruntled customer. In late November 1993, a man named Jerry Stevens failed to get mail for the fourth day in a row. Stevens, who lives in one of Chicago's north lakefront postal districts, helps run a party planning service that is dependent on diligent mail deliveries. In search of his missing mail, Stevens went to the Graceland station and--while waiting for a clerk to check on anything that might have been left behind--he strayed briefly through a pair of double Dutch doors and into a work area. There, Stevens said he saw a small mountain of undelivered mail "as wide as my apartment building." When the clerk reported there was nothing there for Stevens, he went home and, steaming with indignation, called one of the post office's central complaint numbers.

As postal inspectors would later note, those central information and complaint lines might ring as often as 85 times without being answered. But as bad luck (for the post office) would have it, Stevens got through quickly and reported what he had seen. A half hour later Stevens got a call from a "Mr. Bizbee," who said he was the Graceland station manager. He made a perfunctory apology for Stevens' poor mail service, and then--according to Stevens--Bizbee added: "The next time you visit our station, if you set one foot inside those Dutch doors again, you'll be subject to arrest." Security of the mails, and so forth.

Seething, Stevens called a reporter friend. An ensuing story detailed Stevens' experience and other postal problems along the north lakefront, problems that had been festering for years despite customer complaints and increasingly bitter protests from the area's congressman, Rep. Sidney Yates.

The mid-December news story, coming a month after yet another angry Yates letter to Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, led Rogers to order his staff and a team of postal inspectors to find out just how bad things really were "up north." The resulting two-pronged inquiry took the hide off Chicago Postmaster Jimmie Mason's north lakefront operations and found that many of the problems were citywide. Yet Mason did little except write Rogers an upbeat memo that promised reform without providing substance. In response to that lack of response, members of Rogers' staff leaked copies of the two investigative reports.

These reports, which hit the city like bombshells, revealed that:

* Mammoth mounds of undelivered mail were found at several stations--including one pile 800 feet long, nearly the length of three football fields.

* Information and complaint phones sometimes rang scores of times before being answered--if they were answered at all.

* Mail deliveries frequently were late or were skipped; many carriers lost mail, failed to deliver it, or didn't forward it for weeks or months. Other carriers didn't want to go out in the cold, or came in when it got dark without checking with supervisors.

* Lines were lengthy and waits interminable at postal station windows; lobbies were dingy and filthy; stamp and envelope vending machines didn't work; clerks were surly and unhelpful; and vacation "holds" on mail weren't started or weren't stopped.

* Discipline was erratic and frequently ineffective and morale was too often in the toilet. Workers complained that on-the-job drug and alcohol abuse sometimes went unpunished.

Hard working, conscientious carriers and postal station workers too often were discouraged by the chaos around them. The performance of even the best, most dedicated employees suffered as a result. Adding names and faces to these investigative findings were individual horror stories from postal customers who had phoned, faxed, messengered--and even mailed in--their complaints to reporters after the December story had run.

Before, during, and after this series of disclosures, there was more bad news. One carrier was found with 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail--some more than two months old--stashed in the back of his uninspected delivery truck. Another 20,000 pieces, some 11 years old, were found when the basement of a retired carrier's home was cleaned out. Nearly 200 pounds of commercial mail was found burning beneath a railroad viaduct and more than a ton of undelivered mail was found when fire broke out in a Chicago carrier's suburban condo. Fifteen hundred pieces of mail, much of it five years old, were found beneath the back porch of an ex-carrier's former home, and a rural letter carrier, who took his car in for new shocks, stunned mechanics when they found his trunk full of old mail.

In the midst of this maelstrom, Illinois Senator Paul Simon pressured Runyon into visiting Chicago for a one-day firsthand inspection. Angry postal customers took after him verbally like curs chewing on a mail carrier's cuffs. Runyon retreated to Washington and three days later sent in an unprecedented task force of 27 big city postal experts, who were rushed to the scene like an infectious disease team from the Centers for Disease Control. Its mission: to diagnose and cure what had become, by that time, a very high profile sickness.

Reporting back to the postal board, the task force said it found a mail system "in disrepair" that had been "deteriorating for years." On any given day, 40 percent of the north lakefront's 1.3 million pieces of mail was behind schedule or stalled. The citywide figure for all 51 postal stations was 30 percent.

By the time the dust had settled, not only had Rogers been demoted and dispatched to Kansas City, but Chicago Postmaster Jimmie Mason had been exiled to South Carolina, and Celestine Greene, the city's mail processing chief, had been bounced out to the city's southern suburbs.

Despite these actions, Chicago's traumatic experience has left the post office and its customers without answers to crucial questions. What went so drastically wrong in Chicago, and why? Whatever it was, is it curable? Is the task force's "back to basics" approach sufficient medicine? What took Washington so long to prescribe this radical cure? And most important: Is the city's post office symptomatic of deeper difficulties that are waiting to surface in other major cities?

That last question has been bugging the Postal Service's board of governors. It meets monthly--privately for one full day, then publicly for an hour or two the next morning. At the open meetings, hints have been dropped about the board's private apprehensions: Runyon has warned that Chicago's problems should serve as "a wake-up call" for the entire Postal Service. And after the closed-door sessions, which are supposed to be confidential and off-the-record, several board members have confided that Chicago's ailments have been the subject of angry exchanges and worried discussions.

The concern: that publicity about Chicago's problems would lead employees in post offices around the country to blow the whistle on similar problems--especially in New York and Los Angeles, where difficult problems already have drawn a smattering of national attention.

Postage Overdue

For the U. S. Postal Service, the spotlight that Chicago's problems has attracted could not have come at a worse time. The system is in the process of raising rates, with the cost of a 29-cent first class mail stamp expected to increase to 32 cents in early 1995. Federal law provides that when the Postal Service starts to run a deficit, it must ask the Postal Rate Commission for a rate increase. And if the commission decides the Postal Service's fiscal ills are real, the commission must approve the increase. Obviously, Runyon believes this unpleasant medicine will go down easier if the public is convinced the post office is doing a good job.

Competition, moreover, is increasing daily from Federal Express and from other companies and technologies, particularly fax machines. More and more critics are rapping the Postal Service for its monopoly on first class mail, warning that the service is a dinosaur that must be prodded into greater efficiency by letting other companies compete for that lucrative first class business.

And the post office has been aggressively seeking to burnish its image--spending millions of dollars on a new logo, on nationwide advertising, and on publicity about surveys such as a recent Roper Poll that found that the Postal Service is the nation's most respected government agency. Runyon has even hired Ronald Reagan's former White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, in hopes he'll help make Runyon another great communicator. But the adverse publicity generated by the Chicago disclosures threatens to trash those public relations investments.

But, in Chicago anyway, the post office is making some changes. Hundreds of new carriers are being hired and properly trained. Supervisors are being retrained and retired managers are being brought back as consultants. Truck maintenance and scheduling are stressed, so mail now gets to stations on time. Carriers are taught improved sorting and delivery techniques. Mail drop-off and relay boxes are monitored, as are pickup boxes. Station lobbies are being cleaned, painted and lit better. Lobby supervisors speed service at lunch time; window clerks are being trained to smile and help; station hours are extended and all vending techniques taught. Faulty forwarding systems and machines are being repaired. Neighborhood councils are being set up to get customer input.

Brought in to replace Rogers and coordinate the cleanup was William Good, from the Postal Service's big Long Beach, California, district--a popular, respected one-time NASA engineer. Good and the task force now claim service is slowly improving. But a number of other problems have not yet been fully addressed:

* In the Postal Service's recent restructuring and "buyout" campaign to retire senior--and therefore more expensive--personnel, Chicago lost 1,500 senior carriers, supervisors and other veterans out of a workforce of 16,000. Replacements have been too slow in coming, with too little training.

* Nationwide, the postal system's once-tough discipline and management style has softened to permit more worker-management cooperation, a major Runyon emphasis. But in Chicago, many supervisors complain discipline is a serious problem.

What took Washington so long to act on Chicago? In the Postal Service's national quarterly survey of customer satisfaction, Chicago has ranked dead last since the survey started in 1991. Yates has been hectoring postmasters general since 1987. Chicago had seven postmasters in seven years. But Washington didn't step in forcefully until those internal memos leaked out.

If any major national business found its third largest market so screwed up for so long and failed to act, heads would roll at headquarters.

In mid June, Runyon finally buckled under what Clay called this "chorus of criticism" and put in a new chief operating officer. He also eliminated a layer of vice presidents and reorganized the service's higher eschelons to make Washington and regional executives more accountable.

But there remains this intriguing question: Which city will be next? Where else are there long lines at windows and surly, arrogant clerks, late mail deliveries, long lost letters, lengthy forwarding snafus, uncaring carriers, unsympathetic complaint handlers, and inquiry phones that ring interminably?

Does any of that sound familiar? If so, why not follow Jerry Stevens' example and call a reporter?