Letter carrier DD Price shares a laugh with Mavis Benson at the Avalon Gallery on Atlantic Avenue.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
— Unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service
By Ron Hayes
East Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach doesn’t see a lot of snow, and the mail is delivered before sundown, but there is rain, and lately way too much heat. Sometimes thoughtless drivers spray puddles. Sometimes tourists ask directions, then contradict you when you offer them. And once there was this dog.
None of that has stayed the courier from her appointed rounds.
On Oct. 3, Denise Diane Price of the U.S. Postal Service will have been delivering the mail along East Atlantic Avenue for 43 years.
“Letter carrier is the correct term these days, but little kids used to call me Aunt Sam. You know, like Uncle Sam?” she says with a laugh. “I’ve seen kids grow up around here.”
Everyone who knows Denise Diane Price calls her DD — no periods, just DD — and everyone seems to know DD Price. “I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else,” she says. “People greet me. They beep their horns at me. I don’t always know who it is, but I always wave.”
Her hair color has changed since this picture from the early 1990s, but Price’s radiant smile is still present. Photo provided
She was 23 when she started the job. She’s 66 now.
“I grew up in Stuart,” she begins. “We had one red light.”
After high school, softball got her to Palm Beach Junior College on a scholarship. “They paid me $400 a month to play shortstop for the Palm Beach Pacers.”
She earned an associate’s degree, worked as a lab technician drawing blood at Bethesda Memorial Hospital, left to work for UPS. And then, on Oct. 3, 1981, she was hired by the U.S. Postal Service and started delivering the mail on East Atlantic.
DD Price make her way through the lobby of the Colony Hotel.
Getting in her steps — for miles and miles
In those early days, her route reached from Swinton Avenue east to the Intracoastal Waterway, then all the side streets up to Northeast Fourth Street.
“They put me on this route because it was 14 miles and nobody else wanted it,” she says. “They wanted to slide their arm out of the truck and put the mail in a curbside box.”
DD walked the route, and walked, and walked. The town grew. More buildings went up, more people moved down. More people meant more mail, so more carriers were needed, and DD’s route grew smaller. Today, she delivers from the railroad tracks east, but only up to Northeast Second Street, five or six miles a day.
“I’m at the main post office on Military Trail by 8 a.m. and I hit the street by 11 a.m.”
She pushes a three-wheel cart bearing four bags of mail, one bag each for letters, parcels, flats, and outgoing. Down the south side of Atlantic, back up the north, and then the side streets.
“I punch out about 4:30 p.m., and I never go to a gym.
“I never work out. This is my exercise.”
She’s seen a lot of changes, walking the avenue for 43 years.
“So many people use email now, the loads are lighter than when I started,” she says. “The other day I heard a little boy ask his mother what the blue box was. He had no idea what a mailbox is.”
She’s seen the street transformed from attorneys’ offices and travel bureaus to trendy restaurants and boutique art galleries.
“When I started, there were seven travel agencies,” she recalls. “The attorneys used to open their offices about 9:30 and they wanted their certified letters. Now the avenue doesn’t really start kicking until 11.”
No one had cell phones when DD began. They had beepers. Now she carries a GPS scanner that records the bar codes on packages.
“That’s how the tracking number can tell you when I delivered it,” she says.
Price stops to chat with Shannan Robinson at Lilly Pulitzer on Atlantic Avenue. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
Aggravation abounds, but so does gratification
Yes, there are aggravations.
“I’m easygoing,” she says, “but one thing that pisses me off is being splashed by dirty street water. Some people just don’t think anymore.”
Tourists can be both frustrating and funny.
“They ask me for directions, and I give them directions and they say, ‘No, that’s not the way, I was just there.’”
She laughs. “I’ve actually seen tourists run out of the ocean because it’s raining.”
And there’s weather to deal with, of course. Torrential rain. Sweltering heat.
“If it rains, I get wet,” she says. “If I feel in danger, I stop. Lightning, I sit in the truck. But I’m a Floridian. I’m used to the heat, but it’s been brutal lately. As soon as I wake up, I drink 16 ounces of water.”
The businesses along the avenue offer her water, and Restroom for Customers Only doesn’t apply to her.
Over the years, addresses became names and names became friends.
When Hand’s Office at 325 E. Atlantic closed in June 2021 after 87 years, owner David Cook lamented the changes on the avenue, but treasured the memory of old friends like his letter carrier.
“If you wanted to know what was really going on along the avenue,” he says, “you could ask DD and she would always tell you.”
DD was knowledgeable, and she was reliable.
“When it was her day off, she’d warn us because some other person would deliver, and we’d get everybody else’s mail. Then we’d redistribute it until DD was back. It was comical.”
DD has been delivering mail to the Northern Trust bank at 770 E. Atlantic Ave. for nearly three decades, and Senior Vice President Stacey Hallberg has known her for 20.
“While we value her service,” Hallberg says, “it’s DD’s friendship and daily positivity that we love most. It’s much more than just mail. It’s mail with a smile!”
Personal connections extend beyond the job
She had already been delivering the mail for 23 years when John and Mavis Benson opened their Avalon Gallery at 425 E. Atlantic in 2004.
“People complain that they’re just a number,” Mavis Benson says, “but having DD as our mail person you’re a number and a name.”
After their gallery had been open a year, DD invited the Bensons to a 2005 Thanksgiving breakfast at her house in Del-Ida Park.
“Her yard was set beautifully with linens and china and silver, and nothing but tables filled with her friends,” Benson remembers. “Good Southern food, and I was like, This is it. This is the place to be, the people to know. She gives us a sense of community.”
Benson once told DD that when DD retired, she would too. That’s not likely to happen any time soon.
“I’ll retire when I wake up some morning and say, OK, that’s enough,” DD says. “I enjoy my job. What are you if you’re not out meeting people and seeing what they’re going through? Delray Beach isn’t the old, cracked sidewalks anymore, and I’m growing with the avenue.”
And besides, in all her 43 years of delivering mail, Denise Diane “DD” Price has been attacked by a vicious dog only once.
“I opened the door to hand a lady the mail,” she explains, “and their dog ran out and grabbed my ankle and wouldn’t let go.
“It was a Chihuahua.”
About that motto
“Neither snow nor rain...” is not the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service. However, it is chiseled in gray granite over the entrance to the James A. Farley building at Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street in New York City.
The sentiment comes from book 8, paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by the Greek historian Herodotus.
During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers who served with great fidelity.
According to the USPS, the firm of McKim, Mead & White designed the Post Office building, which opened to the public on Labor Day in 1914. One of the firm’s architects, William Mitchell Kendall, was the son of a classics scholar and read Greek for pleasure. He selected the “Neither snow nor rain …” inscription, which he modified from a translation by Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard University, and the Post Office Department approved it.
Comments