Tall Mail Box At Richburg Stops, Baffles Passersby
Times Herald
Unknown Date
Unknown Author
Transcribed by Kathy S. Bentley
RICHBURG - Most people laugh some time. Some people are always smiling. But it was left for Albert L. Weimer to include the whole neighborhood in his sense of humor.
People driving Rt. 275 – the Friendship to Bolivar road – swerve and jam on the brakes, and their passengers gawk at the “A. L Weimer” mail box sticking up out of the ground.
You know the kind of mail box. A little bigger than a bread box, like a shoe box, only made of metal, with a metal red flag on a moveable arm to show when there’s mail in the box?
Well Mr. Weimer has one of those.
The only thing is that it sits atop an 18-foot-high pole, and is marked “AIR MAIL.”
The box is on the west side of the road, popularly known as the East Notch, as you are driving north out of Richburg.
Why? Was the question.
Mr. Weimer, with The Air Preheater Co., Inc., of Wellsville 18 years, explains the original box suffered from “mail-nutrition,” he installed a new one – at the regulation or human height nearer the house - and stuck the old one up high to “attract air mail.”
He set it up last summer.
Has he ever got any mail in the 18-foot-high mail box? Yes, once.
The rural delivery man, entering the spirit of the joke, paid a Huckleberry Finn kid 25 cents to “shimmy” up the pole and deposit a piece of mail.
The mail man later phoned Mr. Weimer to tell him he’d better look in the box.
Manhandling a ladder across the road and up against the pole – at which point the joke began to wear thin – Mr. Weimer found, yes, there was a letter tucked in the box.
It turned out to be a bill.
What with screeching tires outside, curious callers and inquiries by telephone, Mr. Weimer, who talks enough during the daytime as Air Preheater’s manager of purchasing got out from under. Now you won’t find him listed in the telephone directory.
But his practical sense of humor doesn’t stop with the mail box.
He bought one of those inflatable girl dummies, dressed her for swimming, and anchored her in his backyard swimming pool – easily viewable from the road. It looked to passersby as though someone were drowning.
Two drowning dummies disappeared.
A third has been purchased, and, under the name, “Matilda,” can be expected to make her appearance this summer.
Sometimes, Mr. Weimer says – to which the Richburg-Cady-town-Nile vicinity may or may not agree – it just gets “too dull.”
Times Herald photo