The Chicago post office scandal.

• Author: Nicodemus, Charles

For Ormer C. Rogers, Jr., the road to Kansas City was paved with good intentions. Not that Kansas City is hell, but it is the place where Ormer Rogers--the Chicago area's top postal official--was sent after he decided to get a handle on just how bad mail service was in Chicago's five long-troubled north lakefront postal districts.

You may have heard about Chicago's mail problems once they became a nationally publicized headache for the post office. What you might not know is that the chain of events that helped sink Ormer Rogers was set in motion by a disgruntled customer. In late November 1993, a man named Jerry Stevens failed to get mail for the fourth day in a row. Stevens, who lives in one of Chicago's north lakefront postal districts, helps run a party planning service that is dependent on diligent mail deliveries. In search of his missing mail, Stevens went to the Graceland station and--while waiting for a clerk to check on anything that might have been left behind--he strayed briefly through a pair of double Dutch doors and into a work area. There, Stevens said he saw a small mountain of undelivered mail "as wide as my apartment building." When the clerk reported there was nothing there for Stevens, he went home and, steaming with indignation, called one of the post office's central complaint numbers.

As postal inspectors would later note, those central information and complaint lines might ring as often as 85 times without being answered. But as bad luck (for the post office) would have it, Stevens got through quickly and reported what he had seen. A half hour later Stevens got a call from a "Mr. Bizbee," who said he was the Graceland station manager. He made a perfunctory apology for Stevens' poor mail service, and then--according to Stevens--Bizbee added: "The next time you visit our station, if you set one foot inside those Dutch doors again, you'll be subject to arrest." Security of the mails, and so forth.

Seething, Stevens called a reporter friend. An ensuing story detailed Stevens' experience and other postal problems along the north lakefront, problems that had been festering for years despite customer complaints and increasingly bitter protests from the area's congressman, Rep. Sidney Yates.

The mid-December news story, coming a month after yet another angry Yates letter to Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, led Rogers to order his staff and a team of postal inspectors to find out just how bad things really were "up north." The resulting two-pronged inquiry took the hide off...