Mailman Bob Steck had a thousand different friends every week

After 25 years of delivering mail to the southern half of downtown Rehoboth Beach for the U.S. Postal Service, letter carrier Bob Steck said he knew his route down to the minute.

“If I hit the street at 10 a.m., I knew exactly where I was going to be at noon, at 1 p.m., at 3 p.m. and at 3:30 p.m.,” said Steck. 

He wasn’t the only one who knew where he should be. Package-scanning technology allows management to know where he is down to the minute, he said.

Management knows how many minutes and how many steps it should take to deliver a specific block, said Steck. If they wanted to, management could be a real stickler about why one block took 18 minutes instead of 10 minutes, like the computer model says it should take, he said.

“Sometimes customers have questions and it just takes longer,” said Steck, who recently moved to Florida with his wife to be closer to his daughter and son-in-law. He managed to score a new route with the post office branch in Venice.

Rehoboth Beach is approximately one square mile, and Steck’s route was pretty much the southern half of that – Wilmington Avenue south to Lake Drive; the Boardwalk west into Country Club Estates. For the first 15 years, Steck walked the route. Eventually, and begrudgingly, Steck got a mail truck after a senior manager required it. A few years after that, the postal service started delivering packages for Amazon.

“It was a 13-mile walk, which kept me in pretty good shape,” he said. “When we started delivering Amazon packages, the truck was actually needed.”

When he began at the Rehoboth Post Office, Steck was a sub for the first two years. Eventually, what became his route opened up and nobody else wanted it. Steck was happy to get it.

“I’d get to look at the Boardwalk and dolphins every day during the summer,” he said.

Steck’s last day on the job was April 28. A number of longtime customers left notes and cards thanking him for his work. One Scarborough Avenue residence had a big banner on the front of the house. A group of women on New Castle Street had balloons waiting for him. He said it was his customers that made the job fun.

“It’s about being able to get along with the public,” said Steck, on the key to being a successful mailman.

Steck said it was mostly good days on the job, but he still remembers his delivery from Sept. 11, 2001. It was a perfect, blue-sky day, he said, when he was at the Star of the Sea and a customer told him a second plane had hit the second World Trade Center tower.

“Something terrible was happening, so I stopped by St. Edmond and took a second,” he said.

For many of the houses on his route, Steck can recall specific customers and specific stories about those customers. He said he kept a diary of the experiences for years, but stopped after he had too many.

“I’d take a lunch break and I’d write down what happened or what someone said to me. I was to write a book called, ‘Diary of Rehoboth mailman.’ There are funny stories for every house on every block.”

Technically, mailmen aren’t supposed to go into the house of customers, but Steck said after years of delivering their mail, some customers came to expect it.

“I’d have carte blanche at some houses to go inside and drop the mail off because the owners were old and it wasn’t easy for them to get to the mailbox,” said Steck. “There was one old woman’s house where I’d walk in and she would be in her apron baking something like a grandma every day.”

There were a number of bad-weather events in which Steck at least attempted to deliver mail.

One hurricane was bearing down on the East Coast and expected to hit in the middle of the day, so the state closed all the entrances into the city. Steck said the police tried to keep him and his colleagues out, but he convinced them to let him in because he was a federal employee and his boss would expect him to at least try. A few hours later, he said, a cruiser pulled up beside him and forced him to stop because there were reports of tornadoes on the beach.

Another hurricane was predicted to hit in the middle of the night, so he set up camp on a mattress in the old postal annex that was off the Forgotten Mile because it was a one-story brick building that he thought would be safe. He wasn’t the only one looking for refuge that night, he said. About midnight, he heard a knock on the door. It was a rural carrier looking for a place to keep safe.

“I wasn’t going to let him sleep on the mattress with me, but I didn’t care,” said Steck, laughing.

During the holiday season, Steck was well known for dressing up as Santa Claus. It was something he’d seen another carrier do back in Pennsylvania decades ago, and he thought it was a good idea, he said.

Steck said he’d walk up to a house, deliver the mail, ring the doorbell and keep moving. The old people come to the door and see Santa walking away, he said.

“I usually did it the Saturday before Christmas, because that’s when kids would be home,” he said. “People loved it. Kids would get their pictures taken. I’d hear Feliz Navidad coming down from the roofs.”

There were a few times police asked Steck to keep an eye out for suspicious activity because of break-ins and squatting. During one of those times, he came across a house where the mail wasn’t being taken inside, but there were footprints in the snow. He decided to investigate and came across a man inside the house. He said he went and stopped the next cruiser he could find to tell the officer what he’d seen. A few hours later, he found out the man in the house was the owner’s son and he’d been there for a week.

“I was told to stick to the mail,” he said.

Steck has had a firsthand look at all the demolitions that have taken place over the past 15 years or so.

“These were some beautiful houses. I wish I had taken pictures of them,” he said.

As many friends and memories Steck made over the years as a Rehoboth Beach letter carrier, he said his greatest Cape Region legacy will be founding St. Andrew the Apostle Orthodox Church with his wife.

“It was just the two of us and the pastor,” said Steck. Now, it’s doing well and will continue to do so into the future, he said.

Steck said he reports to his new assignment Saturday, May 21. He and his wife are living with their daughter until they can find a house. He said he’s not nervous.

“It’s a great location and a beautiful downtown. I’m looking forward to seeing what they have planned for me,” said Steck.