A Tribute to Our Favorite Mailman

I have never mentioned why I host this postcard blog. I love postcards and I've been collecting them for a long time, but this blog also helps to preserve and honor the memory of John Korinek, a man who delivered mail, collected all things beautiful, and was well loved by friends and family. He died on this day last year, and he is greatly missed. Many of the postcards I post were once his. He would be pleased to know that people are looking at them and enjoying them. I made the postcard below...just one, and sent it off to Kerry, the Postmaster in Cornelius, Oregon, who is doing a special Art of the Postcard exhibition at the Cornelius post office. John would have liked that a lot (except for having his picture on  a card!)

Whenever John called our house, he would always say, "This is John, the mailman." Sometimes we would remind him that he had retired several decades ago, but it didn't matter. Mailman had become part of his identity, for better or worse.

John had a studied appreciation for craftsmanship, beauty, and history. In the 1960s, when old buildings, including churches, were being demolished as part of urban renewal, John would do whatever he could to salvage the precious works of devoted craftsmen. When he asked the crew what they planned to do with the stained glass windows, more often than not the answer was, "If you can get them out before we start demolition in the morning, they're yours." Sometimes he would work through the night to salvage windows, as he did at the First Baptist Church of Binghamton (shown below) when it was demolished (postcard image courtesy of www.CardCow.com)

John also believed that any job, no matter how small, deserved to be done well. We miss his warm heart, and we will forever appreciate his strong principles and sense of honor.