Jerry Higham: Hooper to You
Jerry Higham knows at least a little about a lot of people in this town. A boyish 73, he worked for 35 years at the Meadville post office, mostly at the service window, which helps explain the local archive in his head. He also doesn’t forget a face, a name, or whose uncle used to run what store on which street in town. The post office job has in turn made him at least vaguely familiar to what you might call the Meadville public. Waitresses, people at graduation parties, fellow fans at high school games will turn to him and ask, “how do I know you?” Often he just says, “well, I’ve lived in Meadville a long time.” Telling people you work at the post office can lead to mail-related grievances. A teasing, kind, and interested person, he loves to kibitz about almost anything, just not misdelivered letters and the price of stamps.
Jerry is the youngest in a family of eight children. He was born Harry Gerard Higham. His mother named him Harry after his father, who had died tragically of a heart attack in his early 40s, five months before Jerry’s birth. When she brought her baby home from the hospital and people came by saying, “where’s Harry,” the name, he says, was too much for his mother’s fresh grief, so Jerry he became.
In high school that changed to “Hooper.” “One night,” he explains, “at basketball practice, I just couldn’t miss. It was crazy, like Steph Curry. After practice our coach, Dick Reese, calls me Harry Hooper—there was an old major league ballplayer with that name—and everyone on the team cracked up. The next day in school, Billy Barnes-–do you know him?”
“Yeah, he sold us our first car when we moved here.”
“Billy Barnes calls me Hooper, in the hallway, all day, and it stuck.”
“You must have been really good.”
He laughs. “For one day. That’s all it took.”
He’s still Hooper to all his old friends. The nickname’s endurance probably says something about both the man and the community. Maybe that growing up and staying in a place like Meadville can make a kind, fatherless kid feel permanently and fondly known.
Jerry was nested in versions of community from the start. There was the big and loyal family he was born into. People in town would look at him and say, “you’re a Higham, aren’t you?” His neighborhood was another kind of team. The family lived in Kerrtown, a working class neighborhood across French Creek from the main part of town, and in Jerry’s childhood Kerrtown teemed with kids. The Highams worked hard to make ends meet—his father and then some of his brothers ran a gas station across the street from the family home his dad built—but Jerry’s memories of childhood are centered around life in the Kerrtown playground. “It was just so much fun.” The city ran a handful of neighborhood playgrounds in those days, open all summer long from 9 to noon and one to four, each playground supervised by two school teachers. The highlight was the summer-long softball tournament against the other playground teams—Huidekooper, Shadybrook, Pomona Park.
Like the rest of his siblings, he attended the Catholic school in town, St. Agatha’s (now Seton School), which went from 1st to 12th grade in those days. Jerry didn’t realize how snug a world his school was until, right before his senior year, St. Agatha’s closed for financial reasons and he had to attend Meadville High. “I walked into homeroom that first day of 12th grade and had no idea who anyone was. It was bad.” But he’s Jerry Higham. He made a lot of new friends that year, people he’s still friends with.
When he graduated Jerry shared one priority with every guy he knew: not getting killed in the Vietnam War. He attended Erie Business Center, a two-year business school, deferring his eligibility for the draft until 1972, then got himself in the Army Reserves, which trained (as they still do) in West Mead Township, just east of Meadville proper. His first full-time job was at Meadville Bottling, in the 5th Ward. Then he worked for the railroad, first in Meadville, then in little East Brady, PA, 75 miles to the southeast. (East Brady is the hometown of Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly. Back then, Kelly had just graduated high school and Jerry remembers how outraged the local railroad guys were that the hometown hero had decided to go to the University of Miami instead of Penn State. The bum.)
When railroad work became touch and go—the industry was rapidly contracting in the area—Jerry tried something else: with his brother Mike and their good friend Fred O’Polka, he bought and ran a bar in town, Comics. Business was good (Comics was the first place in the area to serve wings), but in a few years he stepped out of bachelorhood and life shifted again. In the late 70s he had started dating Pam Bookamire, a person as funny and big-hearted as him; they married in 1984, and five years later their twin boys, Ian and Andrew, were born. By this time, Jerry had begun working at the post office. Running the bar became too much.
Jerry got his nickname, Hooper, from his days in the gym at St. Agatha's High School (now Seton School).
The traits of a good post office window clerk—lots of patience, easy kindness, a good memory, a quick mind with numbers and regulations—maps so well onto Jerry’s personality, it’s as if the job chose him. He doesn’t seem to think about life this way, however. Here’s how he describes getting the job.
“There were people around town with these yellow cards. I asked my brother Mike about it—he worked in an office supply store at the time. ‘Oh, that’s to take a test to work at the post office.’ So I went to the post office and got an application, then took the test and got a high score.” He then missed his interview because they mailed the invitation to his mother’s address and she didn’t mention the letter to him till after the interview date. By the time he called them, they had filled the position. But they kept his name on file and he was hired two weeks later—for the Oil City P.O. Later, they let him transfer to Meadville because two other clerks there had left.
If Jerry wasn’t destined for his career, the work certainly played to his strengths. He was so technically proficient at the job that post offices from Pittsburgh to Erie asked him to give their new window clerks on the job training. And meanwhile he just enjoyed helping customers. “The nice ones,” he jokes. There were always the other kind—”people who were pissed off when they came through the door and were going to leave the same way.” A kind of pact developed between him and the other two regular window clerks, John and Terry: if Jerry took one difficult repeat customer, they’d take the next two.
What he remembers most, though, were the many people whose trips to the post office became ways of staying connected, like neighbors. Mrs. Ethridge, for example. (Jerry referred to her this way, no first name, the way a boy might address an older woman whose lawn he mows.) “Her husband owned an electric supply store. She had a mailbox in the post office right near the service windows, and she never remembered her key. She’d wave to me and I’d get her mail and hand it to her. We’re not supposed to do that, but her box was 10 feet away. She was really a lovely lady. She would send me Omaha steaks for Christmas.” When Mrs. Ethridge got sick and moved to Florida. Jerry would, without being asked, send her her Meadville mail in a box. A few out-of-towners depended on him this way. Every Wednesday he’d get a call from an Allegheny professor who summered in Cape Cod, making sure his box of local mail was indeed on its way. This forwarding service was actually the responsibility of the customer’s letter carrier, not Jerry. But the professor called Jerry. Every Wednesday for twenty-five years.
And then there was the Santa correspondence. Letters from local kids came to the post office every December, addressed to Santa. Usually the postmaster just threw them away. When Jerry found this out, he asked if he could answer them. And he did that for decades. He saved a few examples of his handiwork. Here’s how one ends:
“I hear you really have been a good girl this year, at least most of the time. You know when your Daddy was your age he almost got a lump of coal. He still may. No, just kidding hohoho. He is one of the best always! . . . Well, I better get some rest before my big trip. Tell your Mommy I said hi and tell your Daddy to behave because I am still watching. Stay good!
Love,
Santa Claus
Hard to miss the Jerryness. The ribbing and the sweetness. You can imagine how the letter landed, especially with the dad. Maybe he whispers to his wife, “I know that Santa.”
It’s good to know that Santa, to be in his big family of locals.
For many of Jerry's customers, trips to the post office became a way to stay connected, like neighbors.