Tied to the whipping post: taking his licks, Bill Henderson puts his stamp on running the Postal Service like a business.

• Author: Falcone, Susan
• Position: United States Postal Service's North Carolina division - Feature

Marshall Gaskey, who makes a living in the mail business, recently saw an advertisement for a product made by a company called Postal Logic.

"I got quite a kick out of that," says Gaskey, who is vice president of Professional Mail Services of Charlotte and Raleigh. "Postal logic is the biggest contradiction in terms I've ever heard."

As head of North Carolina's postal operations, Bill Henderson is used to catching flak. From his perch in Greensboro, he's likely to hear plenty this month as the biggest rate hike in history takes effect.

But Henderson, 43, is part of a new guard trying to tear down the wall separating the post office from the business community. That new guard is the first generation of postal executives who have risen through the system since the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act, which spun the service off as a quasi-public entity and forced it to operate without subsidies. Congress wanted to make the Postal Service less bureaucratic and more responsive to customers. Henderson's career has been a laboratory test of whether that mission can be accomplished.

He can be excused if he's having second thoughts about his career choice this month. The Postal Service wants to raise rates for second-class and third-class mail - which makes up the bulk of business - by an average of 20 percent. Increases were less than 5 percent during the last two times rates rose, in 1985 and 1988. Previous rate hikes were even smaller and less frequent.

"America suffers from McDonalditis," says Gaskey, whose company pre-sorts envelopes for major mailers. "I want it now, perfect and cheap ... but fast postal service isn't cheap."

Hearing what's wrong with the Postal Service is a family tradition for Henderson. His father was a letter carrier, first in Washington, later as a railway post-office clerk, riding trains and serving remote areas.

"I loved to go inside the railway cars of the train," Henderson says. "In those days ... the clerks wore pistols on their side."

His dad's next transfer was to Black Mountain and a highway post office that required lots of bus travel. "It was a big bus that housed two clerks," he says, "and they'd pick up mail all along the road. Those no longer exist."

Henderson didn't expect to follow his father's trail. "As a kid my ambition was to be a scientist," he says, "not a business person - it didn't have any romance."

But after a stint in the Army and a degree at the University of North Carolina, he found it wasn't easy...