Author Topic: The Riverton post office  (Read 10856 times)

Offline MaineWriter

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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #10 on: May 02, 2006, 02:01:07 pm »
By the way, I have a good friend who is a postal carrier. According to her:

-- The PO would never just stamp DECEASED on a piece of mail and send it back. (Not sure if she's right on this -- she wasn't working for the postal service in 1983).


Yes, I have never seen the post office do this. Hospitals do, though.

Also, just because Jack is dead, the mail would still have delivered to Lureen, not returned to Ennis.
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Offline sparkle_motion

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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #11 on: May 02, 2006, 02:08:43 pm »
By the way, I have a good friend who is a postal carrier. According to her:

-- The PO would never just stamp DECEASED on a piece of mail and send it back. (Not sure if she's right on this -- she wasn't working for the postal service in 1983).

[/quote

Yes, I have never seen the post office do this. Hospitals do, though.

Also, just because Jack is dead, the mail would still have delivered to Lureen, not returned to Ennis.

At my job, we sometimes get returned mail and I have actually gotten a couple of pieces returned "deceased".
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Offline Phillip Dampier

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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #12 on: May 02, 2006, 02:24:44 pm »
-- The PO would never just stamp DECEASED on a piece of mail and send it back. (Not sure if she's right on this -- she wasn't working for the postal service in 1983).

I am surprised to read this.  I have gotten back letters marked "recipient deceased - return to sender" before, but I honestly don't recall if that was someone at the residence handwriting it or if it was stamped that way by the post office.

I figured I'd look into this a little more and discovered some interesting things:

1) The individual postal carrier may mark "deceased" on an envelope and return it at their individual discretion, accounting for the sensitivity of the matter.  Some only do this on business-related mail - never on an individual's card or letter.  Others never do it at all for any reason.  It is completely inappropriate for a postal employee to be in a situation of being the first notifier of someone's passing, so they do take care to avoid this from happening.

2) Unless Lureen and Jack were divorced, there would never have been a reason for the post office to return a card addressed to her husband, unless she specifically requested that mail addressed to him not be delivered (which would make her a cold-hearted bitch, perhaps).  If a spouse passes away, their mail still arrives unless someone files a form with the post office to stop it.

3) I was somewhat surprised they bothered creating a fake facade for the Riverton PO, until you look closely at the crumbling current building.  They did get the basic design of their fake PO correct - plain and boring.  Of course, since they didn't film in Wyoming, I guess this isn't a big surprise.

4) Very few people bother sending postcards anymore (hell, if you're a kid at camp, you can just get on your Verizon or Sprint mobile and phone home), but they were commonly used 25+ years ago.  In rural delivery areas, people often screwed up address information, so the carrier would read the postcard in order to figure out where it was supposed to go.  Perhaps in rural areas, there still might be nosy mail carriers, but in most urban/suburban areas, no postal carrier has the time to spend sifting through other people's mail.

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Postal carriers DO read post cards (of course). Ennis and Jack were circumspect on their cards, but as I mentioned on another thread yesterday, if Ennis is going to get paranoid about someone seeing them talking in the driveway, why wouldn't he worry about this?

This and the reunion kiss were two things that always stuck out for me in the film.  Putting any little details on a postcard in plain site of a spouse or family member is playing with fire, and Ennis must have been terribly dense never to clue in on Alma's growing suspicion.  I'd expect him to have rented a PO box or at least tell Jack to send letters.  :-X  That, or just pick up the phone!  Reach out and touch someone.

As for that reunion kiss, I know enough closeted or uncomfortable people you can't even get away with holding hands in public.  A kiss like that would have never happened outdoors for them.

Quote
But maybe those are just artistic-license issues.

I think so.
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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #13 on: May 02, 2006, 03:03:00 pm »
In rural delivery areas, people often screwed up address information, so the carrier would read the postcard in order to figure out where it was supposed to go.  Perhaps in rural areas, there still might be nosy mail carriers, but in most urban/suburban areas, no postal carrier has the time to spend sifting through other people's mail.

As for that reunion kiss, I know enough closeted or uncomfortable people you can't even get away with holding hands in public.  A kiss like that would have never happened outdoors for them.

Thanks for doing that research, Phillip! For the record, my friend, who works in a suburban post office, says she HAS read post cards (and magazines and catalogues!). Probably not all of them, though. She does keep pretty busy.

Re the reunion kiss, to me the very fact that it DID happen outdoors and that Ennis initiated it (after carefully checking around, of course) says a lot about how overwhelmed he was by emotion at that moment. It WAS more reckless than you'd expect from him. Maybe if it hadn't been four years, he would have been more careful. Though even he admits that he doesn't trust himself to control what happens when this thing grabs hold of them.



Offline nakymaton

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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #14 on: May 02, 2006, 03:30:36 pm »

It WAS more reckless than you'd expect from him.
I think that's part of what scares Ennis so much. I mean, yes, he's scared of what other people will see and think, and he's scarred by what his father forced him to see as a child. But I think Ennis is scared of his own inability to control his passion.

And of course, that's one of the things that's so wonderful about that scene -- to see Ennis lose control in a good way. And to see Jack's reaction... Jack's quite a dreamer, but how often do Jack's dreams actually come true?
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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #15 on: May 02, 2006, 03:57:53 pm »
Nakymaton, I couldn't agree more with everything you said. When Ennis says "if this thing grabs hold of us at the wrong place, wrong time," he's not speculating -- it pretty much just did!

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Offline Kd5000

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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #16 on: May 02, 2006, 04:38:35 pm »
Phillip, I believe it was Osanna who said in an Advocate interview, regarding whether Jack died via an accident or gay bashed, "well what could be worse then not knowing the true fate of the person you loved most." I am paraphrasing. Just as bad would be getting notified that the person you loved most has expired via a returned postcard. Nobody to show up at the door and let you know. No sympathetic phone call. Just bureaucratic coldness.

Then again, I was a bureacrat and I had to call ppl to "verify" if their son or daughter had past away.  Not an easy thing to do. You can only be so delicate about those things...I always felt reptilian after doing it.

Yes Becky, you do pay attn to details.  The number at the post office???   ;)

By the way, I thought that the post office where Ennis gets the notification of death looked like the same one he always used including mailing back the "you bet" postcard.  I don't remember him inside the postoffice. I bet it was a storefront they hijacked in Canada and put up a Riverton Postoffice sign...

Offline nakymaton

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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #17 on: May 02, 2006, 04:47:22 pm »
The thing about the post office in the movie... even though it doesn't look like the real Riverton post office, it looks exactly like the very generic 1960s-or-so vintage post office in the town where I grew up. (Well, the name and zip code were different. ;) ) But, to me, it looked like generic small town America. So it looked perfect to me, even if the real Riverton seems to have a much older (and larger) downtown area than the movie Riverton does.
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Offline MaineWriter

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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #18 on: May 02, 2006, 04:50:17 pm »

By the way, I thought that the post office where Ennis gets the notification of death looked like the same one he always used including mailing back the "you bet" postcard.  I don't remember him inside the postoffice. I bet it was a storefront they hijacked in Canada and put up a Riverton Postoffice sign...

He is inside the post office when he writes the "You Bet" postcard.

Nakymaton: I agree...looks exactly like a rural post office...I have been in many of them over the years. From the pics and other things I have seen, "movie Riverton" is a much smaller town that real life Riverton.
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Re: The Riverton post office
« Reply #19 on: May 02, 2006, 07:55:13 pm »

By the way, I thought that the post office where Ennis gets the notification of death looked like the same one he always used including mailing back the "you bet" postcard.  I don't remember him inside the postoffice. I bet it was a storefront they hijacked in Canada and put up a Riverton Postoffice sign...

He is inside the post office when he writes the "You Bet" postcard.

Nakymaton: I agree...looks exactly like a rural post office...I have been in many of them over the years. From the pics and other things I have seen, "movie Riverton" is a much smaller town that real life Riverton.

When the book Ennis wrote back "you bet," he gave the Riverton address of where he lived. But, the movie Ennis only wrote his "Ennis Del Mar" and "Riverton, Wyoming" in the return address section of the front of the card. The (movie prop) card which Jack sent didn't even have his address on it. How did Ennis know Jack's address in the movie? The book card-from-Jack had Jack's Childress, Texas address on it.

I have seen many small town post offices and even city branch POs which resembled the movie PO. I have a cousin who was the postmaster of a small town PO here in Oklahoma.