GARDEN CITY, NY — For more than four decades, Bruce Schnittker has been a fixture in Garden City on the same letter carrier route.
Now Schnittker is ready to step away from the daily grind.
“It’s getting to be redundant,” Schnittker told Patch. “It took a while to sink in.”
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He plans to file the retirement papers in early November, and happy to sit out the winter weather. But Schnittker will miss the interactions he’s had since starting to deliver mail to Garden City residents and businesses in 1986.
He’s been an indirect part of families for multiple generations.
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“He was my mailman when I was a little kid”: Schnittker, who grew up in Holtsville, will hear this from some residents on the route. “It makes you feel real good.”
Despite the bringing mail in any and all of the elements, Schnittker prefers getting outside for the job. It takes him more than five hours each day (not counting lunch and breaks) to put the mail in everyone’s slots, more than 350 stops.
“The majority of the time I’d rather be out in the fresh air instead of sitting inside in an office stuck to a cubicle,” he said in a voice reminiscent to former WFAN sports host Joe Bonigno.
Schnittker, who lives in Lindenhurst, has enjoyed meeting and knowing people on his route, so much so that he has altered his length of service with the Post Office.
“If it was just the case of letters in the mailbox all the time, I probably would have left 11 years ago,” he said of reaching pension eligible when he turned 55.
In reflecting on his 41 years as a mailman in Garden City:”It goes so fast.”
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