… and other extraordinary tales told by ordinary neighborhood workers.
“It happens all across the country. The mailman is the eyes and ears of the block. We see everything.”
That’s a quote from mail carrier Bob Schellenberg, a mailman with a Lake Highlands route, who the Advocate interviewed for a 2012 story about the people we see every day — people who sometimes blend into the landscape of our lives, until you hear their stories, that is.
Bob Schellenberg’s story:
Bob Schellenberg in 2012. Photo by Can Turkyilmaz
He has reported two dead bodies, conducted highly personal business alongside Tom Brokaw, and frightened strangers with his uncanny acquired knowledge.
He’s not a private investigator, but mail carrier Bob Schellenberg knows as much about Lake Highlands as anyone you’ll meet.
It started near Chicago in the 1970s, when Schellenberg took a job with the United States Postal Service.
“I like people, and you really got to know people. Especially in those days, many of the women stayed home, families had one car … I’d have lunch at the Greek restaurant and could just hand a lot of folks’ mail to them right there.”
A couple of years later, he moved to The Big Apple, where he traded suburban family homes for the Harvard Club and The New Yorker magazine in Times Square.
“Working in New York City was like being on a six-year vacation,” Schellenberg says.
He especially loved to take bathroom breaks at the exclusive Century Club, where he once found himself standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a urinal with newsman Tom Brokaw.
“It would be different now,” he says. “The big boys in New York, they don’t get mail anymore.”
In the mid-’80s he landed in Lake Highlands, where he has walked only a couple of different routes during the past three decades. Day after day, the leather strap of his bag wears thin a patch on the right shoulder of his uniform shirt. Everyone seems to know him — “He’s the nicest person on Earth,” raved one homeowner on his route, adding that he is also “a hoot” and a wine enthusiast.
A hoot, indeed. Once, on a day off, Schellenberg met a man at the golf course and after some conversation, learned the man lived on his delivery route.
“He told me his full name, and I told him his address. It really freaked him out. He was scared that this stranger knew where he lived, until I explained to him that I was his mailman.”
Texas summers and incapacitating ice storms notwithstanding, he loves the routine, though some days are more memorable (and gruesome) than others.
There was, for instance, his first dead-body tip to police. An overflowing mailbox at a house near Flag Pole Hill prompted Schellenberg to contact the cops.
“The Northeast station was on my route, so they knew me,” he says.
Police arrived and discovered the grisly results of what was later determined to be a cult-related double suicide, he says.
Some 10 years later, Schellenberg mentioned to customers his concern about another unchecked mailbox. They decided to get a neighborhood teenager to jump the fence and check things out through the back glass door. The poor kid was met with the sight of a couple of dead bodies. Schellenberg called it in.
“When police arrived, I was a block away, but when they opened those doors, you could smell it all over the neighborhood.
“Both stories, when reported in the daily newspaper, noted that ‘the mailman reported it,’ ” Schellenberg says. “I guess it’s my claim to fame.”
When he’s not adding to the homicide-department caseload or tormenting fellow golfers, Schellenberg loves cooking for his college-student sons and their friends — that is what he was doing when we caught up with him, and he was obviously loving it — and dancing. Yep, some of the guys at the post office still call him “Twinkle Toes,” a nickname he wears with pride. Having studied dance for 10 years, he is quite good, after all. His wife, Lynn, is a dance therapist who works with Alzheimer’s and autistic patients. (It was a job offer for Lynn at Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital, in fact, that brought the couple back to Dallas in the ’80s.)
Being a postman isn’t an easy job — you know, the whole “… snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness …” bit.
“And the older you get, the tougher the weather is on you,” Schellenberg says. And his soft spot for people has caused no shortage of heartache.
“You know people and care about them, see them grow up, go to school get married, but they move away or die, and that hurts.”
But Bob, despite the Twinkle Toes label, is tough. You have to be to do this job. It’s no accident, he says, that he has discovered crime scenes or that people have come to know and trust him.
“It happens all across the country,” he says. “The mailman is the eyes and ears of the block. We see everything.”
Read the full feature, here.
