Neighbors throw party for beloved postman, 'Mr. Bill'

RIDGEWOOD — Hundreds of neighbors packed into the banquet hall of St. Elizabeth's church. Presents were stacked up on a fold-out table. Cake was cut. A DJ blared Journey's tale of working-class love, "Don't Stop Believin'." But no bride or groom were in sight.

The man of the hour, Bill Olave. The occasion, a thank you from the residents whose lives he touched over 17 years serving the same mail route on the West Side. .

Being a mailman, Olave said, "It's more than putting pieces of paper in tin boxes."

While retirement is hardly in the works for the 52-year-old Ridgewood resident, a recent shakeup across the U.S. Postal Service required local offices to combine routes, shifting Olave to a new neighborhood.

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The shindig at St. Elizabeth's on Wednesday night was originally intended as a farewell to Olave, but brokenhearted residents led a hashtag campaign and flooded the local post office with letters urging the brass to keep him where he was. Olave was eventually able to parlay his 30 years at the office to retain much of his existing route. In the end, "Mr. Bill," as he's known to his younger customers, agreed to take on two new streets and lose only two.

Thus, what had started as a farewell soon became a simple celebration of a man loved by so many, including the dogs. Or perhaps more than anyone, the dogs.

Olave keeps a bag of treats alongside his mail bag on every shift.

"When dogs hear the mail truck, they run up the street," Terri Wiatrak of Sherwood Road said last month when news of the rerouting first broke. Olave will walk the dogs back to their homes as he makes his way down the street delivering mail, she said, because he knows where each one lives.

Wiatrak said Olave once told her about a Jackson Terrace family whose dog needed to be put down: "They called Bill because they wanted their dog to see him one last time."

"The whole family brought the dog to my truck as I was out on my route," Olave said at Wednesday's party. "I've known the dog 12 or 15 years. It was a sad moment."

Fellow Sherwood Road resident Peggy Faath said of her small retriever, Codey: "This dog could pull me down to Ho-Ho-Kus when he sees a mail truck."

It's not just dogs that are ebullient at Olave's arrival. As though in his white truck, he were the Good Humor man trundling down the street on a hot summer afternoon, the next-smallest residents on his route go wild.

Olave always keeps lollipops on hand for the children. "A giant bag in his car," Wiatrak said, holding her hands a foot apart.

Olave was clear that while he appreciates the show of support, he wanted any residents he may be leaving behind to know that the change was nobody's fault.

"What happened in the post office, it's not personal," he said. "It affected everybody.

"They took two routes out of the office, and what they do is they feed those two streets that the route is on into a computer. The computer spits back a delivery scheme for all the routes.”

Olave doesn't believe he does anything extraordinary. He said his father always told him to "take pride in what you do, and be the best at what you do."

"If you get to know people, be personable with them on a first-name basis, that just brings it to a whole other level," he said on a recent afternoon, when he was filling in on a co-worker's street after completing his own. He regularly stopped to check the ground for outgoing mail swept into porch corners by the wind.

It was a bitingly cold day, yet Olave, hardly slowed, was difficult to keep up with.

"That’s what it is delivering mail, the people see your face every day," he said.

"So, I understand why they feel the way they feel," he said.

"It's nice to have someone so pleasant delivering the mail," Faath said. "He and I are great football fans. I'm a big Giants fan, and he's a Dolphins fan. So we always have a lot to talk about."

Of course, if being personable was all there was to it, Olave would still be a star. But Olave goes above and beyond.

On a Facebook group that resident Morgan Tully created to celebrate Bill's ongoing legacy, the comments poured in:

"He hides our mail when we're away," one post read.

"Bill was our mailman for 17 years when we lived on California street," said another. "He was so kind and even knew who my parents were when he subbed in their neighborhood. He never made mistakes."

On Wednesday, others recounted the way Olave would text all the mothers on his route every Mother's Day, or know when the teenagers' college acceptance letters were coming and know by the size of the envelope whether to give a heads up to the students or to the parents.

The day after Superstorm Sandy ravaged the area in 2012, Olave worked his route, which had been hit hard by the previous night's whipping winds. He navigated through a labyrinth of fallen trees, making sure neither rain nor gloom of darkened homes kept him from his appointed rounds.

Former Councilwoman Gwenn Hauck recalled his service on that day. "He'd say, 'Here, hold this wire up for me so I can get through,' and I'd do it.

"It's his heart that makes him different," Hauck continued, "but also his intellect. He knows what to do ... I ran for office because I wanted to bring people together. I couldn't do it."

Motioning to the packed room of residents who all came to show their appreciation for what Olave had done for them throughout the years, she added, "He's a mailman, and he could."