Pack loves helping deliver

As one regular heads out the door, the next approaches the counter.
“Hello Larry,” comes the greeting from Thurman Pack behind the counter.
Pack has a host of regulars — Eldon Campbell, Charlie Loper, Tim Caster, Mark Arnold, he says, rattling off a few of the names — having manned the window at the United States Postal Service’s office in Portland since 2003.
“He’s a great guy,” said Charles Whittington, another regular who has been visiting Pack regularly since he moved to Portland from Columbus, Ohio, in 2006. “He always takes care of me and gets me what I need.”
A father of four and grandfather of 10 who lives with his wife Becky in Hartford City, Pack spent 11 years in the United States Army. After leaving in 1983, he was a mechanic in Georgia for about a year and then took a carpentry job in Texas.
But in the mid 1990s the construction industry in the Longhorn State took a downturn, and Pack was forced to look elsewhere for work. He got a job with USPS, moved to the mail-processing center in Fort Wayne a few years later and then was transferred to Portland.
“They forced me into this job down here,” Pack says, grinning. “Up there I was working nights, weekends, split days off. I mean, it was just crazy. And they moved me into a job where I work Monday through Friday, 8 to 5.”
He said he likes the small-town atmosphere, which is something to which he’s more than accustomed, having grown up about 30 miles from the nearest town in a house on Devil’s Featherbed Road in the hills of southern West Virginia.
On his typical day he arrives at the post office, gets his stamps out and preps his cash drawer.
“And then open the window and start selling stamps,” Pack said.
That’s what he does all day, saying he enjoys the interaction with his customers and making sure they get their mail where it needs to be in a timely fashion. He gave his regulars a scare in December, when surgery to remove a brain tumor (and three more surgeries that followed because of a staph infection) took him away from work.
But he’s back now, and he has no plans of leaving anytime soon.
“I’ll probably be standing there at the window when I die,” he said.