BELFAST - During his 28 years at the U.S. Postal Service's Belfast office, Steve Clark, who is retiring this week, developed a memorable style of customer service.

It wasn't the way he posted envelopes or quizzed you on the contents of your packages — "any perishables, liquids or hazardous materials?" — though he often did these with a kind of theatrical flair.

What set him apart was his determination to cheer up anyone who looked like they needed it. And if you lived here long enough, at some point that probably meant you.

"No matter how mad you are when you come up to my counter, I want you to at least smile," he said this week, repeating the motto he came up with as a way to enliven a repetitious job.

On Tuesday, with two days of work left, he described his strategy with the haven't-missed-one-yet confidence of someone still in the game. But his tone softened when he talked about the cards he's received recently from appreciative customers who heard he was retiring.

"I want to treat people the way I want them to treat me," he said. "I guess I've succeeded at that." 

Clark was born in Massachusetts and moved to Maine at a young age, living in Caribou and Ellsworth before landing in Belfast in 1964. After stints at the Truitt Brothers shoe factory, Penobscot Poultry and Rollie's, a friend tipped him to the idea of working at the post office.

"I'd never thought of the post office as a job," he said. "But it was a good move."

He started in June 1984, a young man who still had most of his hair, and all of his fingers (he lost the pinkie on his right hand to a circular saw in 2003). Back then, all the mail was sorted manually. As Clark recalled, this got especially intense around Christmas.

"We sorted by hand in 2-foot trays, three of us sorting and we'd have 70 feet of mail to sort in a couple hours," he said, pointing to the ceiling as though to a seven-story tower of envelopes — the measurement, he said later, was in lineal feet, which amounted to around 35 trays.

"You had to know all the routes by heart," he said, making another gesture; this time it was tossing letters rapidly into an array of slots.

The process changed over time as the Postal Service shifted to centralized sorting facilities. Today, the mail arrives from hubs in Hamden or Scarborough pre-organized for specific delivery routes in Belfast, down to the proper sequence of house numbers on any given street. There are still the odd missorted letters, Clark said, but not many.

During his nearly three decades of postal work Clark never did the "snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" thing but said this wasn't unusual.

"If you're a carrier, you don't want to be a clerk inside," he said. "If you're a clerk, you never want to be a carrier."

Clark was always a clerk, and in his time behind the counter he gleaned bits and pieces of his neighbors' lives, much the way a bartender does.

For the last 17 years he's lived in Stockton Springs. But in conversation he returns again and again to Belfast and how he believes the city has changed for the better in recent years. One of the most memorable examples was a moment he witnessed last summer.

"I looked out the window, and I could see both sides of the street and it was really busy, up and down," he said. "And we were busy here, with a lot of people from away. It was really great to see that with the all stores doing well."

Belfast has been on an upswing, but the future hasn't looked quite as bright for U.S. Postal Service in recent years. Clark said some of the trouble is an inevitable side-effect of the shift toward electronic communications. The hardships were really amplified, however, by the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which mandated that the postal service prefund 100-percent of its future retirement program, a 75-year prospect, within 10 years of the bill's passage.

"I'm paying for my grandkids who aren't even born yet," Clark said. "That doesn't make any sense, and we're the only company in the country that has to do that."

Clark's own retirement is covered, and aside from gardening, spending time at the pool in the summer and maybe doing some traveling, he hasn't made any big plans yet. After a long career of talking to people, he acknowledged that the idea of quiet retirement might be short lived.

"I'm a people person," he said. "That's all I've ever done. That's all I know. I know how to make people smile."

Assuming the USPS survives, Clark said things at the Belfast Post Office will continue after he's gone. "I replaced Lucy," he said referring to a former postal worker. "And someone else will replace me."

Of course he's right, but not everyone has taken it in stride, including an elderly woman with whom he recently shared the big news.

"I said, 'Betty, I'm going to retire,'" Clark said, playing back the conversation.

She was hard of hearing, so he had to say it again. Finally the words registered.

"She said, 'NOOOOOO! Who's going to take care of me!'"

Clark repeated the story later that day. Both times it made him smile.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com.