Twenty years of teamwork delivering mail to rural residents came to an end recently, when Delmar and Betty Kesterson of Maxwell retired. For 20 of those years, Betty sorted the mail each morning at 7:30 a.m. and Del delivered it. The route covered 126 miles south, west and north of Maxwell, from up the north hills up to the south hills. “They worked together as a team, postmaster Dalene Ferguson said. They worked six days a week without fail and they took care of their customers. They delivered mail to about 140 customers.

He covered the canyons in both directions,” Ferguson said, “including both Cottonwood and Box Elder to the south. When the weather was wet he would have to turn around up there, because there’s a little hill at the south end of those canyons that gets too slick to climb. When that happened, it would add 25 miles to the route. It hardly ever stopped him. One day in the last five years, after a really bad rain made a five-foot pond in Box Elder Canyon Road, Del missed three customers. But he never missed anyone two days in a row, Ferguson said. Del said he was lucky enough to never hit a deer, despite a few close calls with cattle, turkeys and hunters in the fall. He received a 20-year safe-driving pin.

The crazy hunters would stop in the middle of road or drive down the middle of the road,” he said. “You had to look out for them. They were the worst menace during the first few days of pheasant, deer and turkey seasons. Del once helped delivered a calf for a cow lying in the middle of the road in the south hills. She was having trouble, he said. I was not really prepared, but I always had rags and water with me if I had a flat tire. The owner repaid the favor with a six-pack of beer. Del enjoyed giving customers a fair deal. The patrons would irritate me sometimes by throwing letters and some change in the box (instead of stamped letters), but I probably irritated them by delivering mail to the wrong address sometimes, so I guess it probably evened out, he said with a chuckle.

Contributed by Robin Bailey from (Nebraska) North Platte Bulletin - Published 7/30/2006