CORINTH — Dave Carrier broke a few rules in his job as Vershire’s mailman. That is why he was beloved by people on his route and why they mourned his passing by hanging black ribbons from their mailboxes.
Carrier, who died at age 68 of a brain aneurysm at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on March 17, delivered the mail to homes along the back roads of Vershire.
A dairy farm boy who grew up in neighboring West Corinth, Carrier built his own Don Quixote-like wooden castle house with an octagonal tower on land that was once part of his parent’s farm.
There, surrounded by acres of lawn — which he mowed with a push mower — and open fields, he kept a couple steers that he raised for beef, hayed and maintained West Corinth’s two cemeteries. He found joy in operating his tractor and machinery, producing about a 1,000 bails of hay a year, which would bring in a little extra money.
He loved the rural life and rarely saw a need to go far, preferring to stay close to the land and people who were familiar to him and to whom he was unstinting in his willingness to help.
“You couldn’t take the farmer out of him. He’d done it all his life,” said Kevin Longto, a friend and neighbor. “Some guys like Dave never get it out of their system.”
But it was Carrier’s job as a mail carrier — and he’d laugh with everyone else at how his name matched his occupation — which he executed with extraordinary devotion and generosity that endeared him in the hearts of people he served along his route in Vershire.
Cards, toys, chocolate candy bars, stuffed animals, coins and cash bills: Carrier was like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy rolled into one. Homes on his route frequently discovered little — and sometimes not so little — presents left by him in their mailbox.
The cards would never be signed, the gifts and money would mysteriously appear. But everyone knew it was Carrier who left them.
“Dave went above and beyond his duties. People are having a hard time since Dave’s been gone,” said Terry Lemieux, the clerk at the Vershire post office who worked with Carrier getting the mail ready for his morning delivery route. “The guy loved this job.”
Carrier would show up exactly at 8:25 every morning “on the dot,” Lemieux said — and the more mail there was waiting for him to deliver, the more he liked it.
“At Christmas there is mounds and mounds of packages,” Lemieux said. “Most people get overwhelmed, but not Dave. He’d go ‘oh boy!’ and sing the (Johnny Mathis) song It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas over and over again. … He was seriously happy about it.”
Risa Kingsbury, who was a mail carrier for 35 years and for whom Carrier would substitute before he became a full-time carrier, described him as “the best sub carrier I ever had, and I had several.”
Carrier would bring her packages to her car so she wouldn’t have to carry them herself, she said, and always held the door open for her.
“He had very good manners,” Kingsbury said. “He was from the old school and believed in old-school rule. He treated the customer the way you wanted to be treated.”
To Sheila Bedi and her 10-year daughter, Carrier was simply known as “Mr. Mailman.”
“We didn’t even know his real name until he passed,” Bedi said.
Carrier would leave 50-cent pieces with unsigned notes and holiday cards in Bedi’s mailbox for their daughter, who in turn would leave for him in the mailbox a dozen eggs from chickens she raised. Another time Carrier left a miniature mailbox with $25 worth of quarters in it for her daughter.
“He didn’t sign his name because it was against protocol,” Bedi said.
But a remarkable gift came in January when Bedi’s husband was at a Boston hospital for a heart transplant operation. Twice during the month Carrier left $100 in their mailbox, Bedi said.
“It was good opportunity to teach my daughter the art of writing thank-you notes and to be grateful,” Bedi said.
Carrier had simple appetites, friends said. His favorite dish was macaroni and cheese and, although he was not adverse to a cold beer after an afternoon of mowing lawns, he had a passion for chocolate milk, of which he consumed several quarts a day.
On the roads around Vershire, which Carrier traveled in a 1998 Toyota RAV4 with a motor rebuilt by Longto, Carrier would give his familiar wave — two fingers and a flick of the wrist.
“If you were walking along the route he’d stop and talk to you and let you know if he happened to see a bear or if someone else had,” said Nicole Fogarty.
Fogarty said that “no matter the weather” Carrier always brought the family’s packages to the door, and if no one was home he’d leave them in the garage so they’d stay dry. That saved the trip and was a big help, she said, because “the post office in town has very limited hours.”
“He guaranteed you have it,” Fogarty said.
Although he never earned much money, Carrier was generous in giving what he had to others.
Nancy Ertle, the town clerk in Corinth and executor of his estate, said that after her oldest daughter’s father died before her second birthday, Carrier began leaving stuffed animals, toys and, as she grew up, birthday cards with $20 bills in them.
Later, in her 20s, when she asked to buy Carrier’s pickup truck from him, he refused to accept any money and instead gave it to her. He also paid for her postal box at the post office, Ertle said, and never told her daughter he was doing it.
And when Ertle’s youngest daughter went away to college, a card and $500 was left for her in the mailbox.
“Dave was very giving,” Ertle said. “He cared about the people around him.”
He was also unwavering in the Postal Service’s popular — although not official as assumed — motto that “neither snow nor rain” shall prevent the carrier from doing his job, said Gene Craft, town clerk and treasurer in Vershire.
“There were people who weren’t getting their mail after he died,” Craft said. “They complained, ‘How come?’ I’d tell them, ‘Well, you need to clean the snow away from your box.’ ‘Oh, I never did that,’ they’d say. Because Dave always delivered the mail no matter what. He spoiled a lot of people.”
There was the side of Carrier that sometimes left people shaking their heads.
Last year he bought an above-ground pool, which was never unpacked, with plans to build a structure around so he could have an “indoor pool” in winter, Longto said. His answering machine at home regularly featured diatribes against politicians that were recorded on a nearly weekly basis. (Carrier would joke it was a good way to ward off unsolicited callers.)
A private man and lifelong bachelor, Carrier didn’t share much information about himself with others, although Longto said his friend confided in him that he had been married “for three weeks” when he was young and had once traveled to Brazil to meet a woman he had corresponded with by mail, only to unhappily discover when he got there she was “about twice” the age she purported to be.
A stoic Yankee, Carrier didn’t care for doctors or people making a fuss over him.
But in March when he fell ill, he drove himself to Cottage Hospital in Woodsville. When Cottage wasn’t equipped to accept him, he was helicoptered to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Then when D-H didn’t have a bed, he was helicoptered to a hospital in Concord, where he stayed one night before he was finally flown to Mass General.
Ertle said that in the end Carrier suffered from “a brain hemorrhage” while at Mass General.
Carrier’s remains were cremated and — appropriately, friends note — his ashes mailed by the Postal Service to the Corinth post office. Ertle said the town will hold a memorial service for Carrier at the Town Hall on May 11, from 1-4 p.m.
“We’re going to have a chocolate milk toast for him,” she said.
Carrier’s ashes will then be interred in the West Corinth cemetery — he was the town’s cemetery commissioner — that is adjacent to his property on Cookeville Road, right where he wished to be, Ertle said. He loved his homestead in Corinth, the last remaining part of his parents’ dairy farm.
“It was ironic Dave died in Boston,” Ertle said. “If he knew he was going to die, he wouldn’t have left town, I can tell you that.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
