Hollister resident Mike Rovella remembers asking for the day off from his duties as a letter carrier to participate in his graduation ceremony from San Benito High School.
Now 64, he will be delivering his last stack of mail—after 46 years of service—for the Hollister Post Office Monday Aug. 31. Rovella took the job as a mailman just after he turned 18 years old while he was still a senior in high school, he said.
“I used to be a grocery clerk at one of the local grocery stores and the postmaster shopped there and he kept bugging me about going to work for him,” Rovella said, when he spoke by phone with the Free Lance from the U.S. Post Office in Hollister last week.
Rovella’s family is well known in Hollister. His cousin, Steve, runs the Rovella’s Gym & Health Spa located off Industrial Drive. Rovella remembers a town without a Target, back when there was a Foster Freeze on Fourth Street and a State Theater on San Benito Street, he said. When the post office employee first started delivering mail in Hollister, there were only about six routes but now there are more than 20, he explained.
“It’s grown,” he said. “It’s big.”
The mailman was unsure what he most liked about Hollister or if, in fact, he liked it at all.
“I don’t know,” Rovella said. “I’ve never gone any place else. I don’t know anything else.”
San Jose, he suspected, would be much too big for him, he said. On his current mail delivery route, Rovella delivers letters to a few of his former high school classmates, he said.
Rovella traveled the downtown route between San Benito and Line streets for about 19 years and deposited letters at businesses, the courthouse and “all that good stuff,” he said.
Then, he switched to his current route in Sunnyslope Village, a path he has traveled for 23 years, he said. There are fewer interactions with people on this route since the boxes are set up on corners to receive letters, he said.
“It’s just been a job,” he said. “It’s something I’ve done for so long, it’s like second nature.”
Rovella expected he would get up a few times and get dressed for work before he realized he didn’t have to be there. He was also not quite sure how he was going to fill his free time in his retirement.
“To tell you the truth, I really don’t know,” he said. “I know I’m going to have a lot of time to fill in.”
Rovella’s four kids, grandkids, mother, two brothers and two sisters live in Hollister, so family will be nearby, he said.
“It’s a job,” he said. “It’s boring at times. Sometimes it gets exciting. Sometimes its just a normal job.”
Look for a full story in Friday’s edition of the Free Lance.
