‘Mailman Don’ Gets a Special Delivery of Love

WINNETKA — After 25 years of bringing lunch to shut-ins and playing catch with the neighborhood kids, Don the Mailman is such an institution here that Bill Wessig’s parrot, Blue Boy, squawks “Hi Don” when the doorbell rings.

It’s no wonder then that when Don Broadbent took another job, his old customers got permission from the city and blocked off Quakertown Avenue for a block party in honor of the man they regard as the best mail carrier around.

There are three generations of people now familiar with Don the Mailman, and as the 53-year-old Broadbent stepped out of his car for the surprise party, one young girl no more than 4 years old screamed, “Here comes Don, here comes Don!”

Broadbent, who is leaving his old route for a better paying job as a relief carrier, was presented with a resolution passed by the City Council declaring him to be the “living embodiment of postal carrier perfection.”

His reaction was typically understated. He said it was the community that was special, not him. Organizers said they made the affair a surprise party because they knew that Broadbent would not come if he knew that they were going to fuss over him.

“You really get attached to the people, see the little kids grow up and go to college,” said Broadbent, an unassuming man with salt-and-pepper gray hair and a narrow, square smile. “I’ve been lucky to stay on the same route for so long.”

And everyone in the neighborhood, it seems, has become attached to him.

Bill and Terry Wessig fretted while waiting for word from their son Chuck, who was aboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga during the Gulf War. When a letter finally arrived, Broadbent rushed out of the post office early to take it to them by 8:30 a.m.

“They were on pins and needles waiting for word from their son,” Broadbent said. “I knew him since he was little, and I watched him go to war and it was hard for me too.”

Over the years, he has become as much a part of the neighborhood as any homeowner on the block.

“He really hasn’t just been a mailman, he’s been a friend to everyone in the neighborhood,” said Bill Wessig.

Broadbent has thwarted crimes, cared for the sick on his route, brought bubblegum for the kids and helped with home improvement projects during his tenure on Route 610. On his days off, he often came back to mow the lawn for people who couldn’t get around as well as they used to.

On Sunday, people remembered some of the special things he had done. There were the lunches he shared with Oleg Zarich, an elderly man in the neighborhood with heart troubles, who died last year. Steven Knapton, 22, recalled that Broadbent would sometimes spend his lunch hour playing catch with neighborhood kids.

Others didn’t appreciate his neighborliness nearly as much.

Knowing that one of his customers was home sick, he knocked on the door one day to check on her. When he heard her scream, he broke in the front door, got the woman outside and chased a burglar out of the house.

Sometimes, says his wife Pauline, his neighborly ways have collided with planned family functions. Once, on a routine trip to the grocery store, Broadbent saw that one of his customers had a flat tire. He stopped to help of course, but when he saw that both the flat tire and the spare were nearly bald, he went back into a store and bought two new tires. “He knows so many people that if I send him to the store for a loaf of bread it takes him an hour,” Pauline said. She has run into her husband’s customers, or people who know of him in Las Vegas, Utah and Canada, she said.

He began delivering mail in Manhattan Beach in 1960, but it wasn’t until 1981 that he suffered a letter carrier’s worst nightmare when he fell victim to a rash of dog bites. The worst incident occurred, fittingly, on Friday the 13th of May, 1981, when Broadbent was attacked by Satan, a pit bull who went on to bite eight people, including two children, according to the collective memory of neighbors who hated the dog.

The dog bit Broadbent first in the stomach, then the shoulder and right hand, leaving his thumb dangling by a tendon. It was one time when the biscuits he carries for dogs didn’t work.

That attack left him shaken, he admits, and it took awhile for him to learn to trust animals again. But these days he jokes that he wears shorts so “dogs can see what they’re getting.”

In addition to all the goodwill he’s earned in the neighborhood, Broadbent has twice been named Citizen of the Year by a local elementary school.

Tanai Kingi, his replacement on the route, lives in the neighborhood. He admits that he can’t fill Broadbent’s walking shoes on the 7.5-mile route, which covers 200 homes, and he feels a loss as well.

“He used to deliver my mail too,” Kingi said.

When he isn’t helping people on his route, Broadbent is lending a hand elsewhere, whether it’s working as a Sunday school instructor at St. Martin in the Fields Church in Winnetka or helping relatives with a chore.

“He always made the time to do things even when there wasn’t time,” said his niece, Janet Anderson. “He never forgot a birthday, and there were five of us, and he made every Christmas special.”

“They just don’t make men like that anymore, they just don’t,” she said.

His son David, who toted a video camera to record the day’s events, said he can only remember one time when his father really got angry.

“Only once, when a guy crashed into our house, and the only reason he got mad that time was because he thought the guy was cursing at my mom.”