Old Jake was a master innovator in our rural neighborhood.
He had that inventive, precise German flair.
He was our mailman.
Every day, Jake and his horse Jenny made the 22-mile circuit starting at the town post office, circling through the farmland, and ending at Leonard’s bar back in town.
When it was cold, Old Jake rode the route tucked away in a little heated house he’d made of flimsy timber rescued from a woodpile somewhere. The little house was mounted on his buggy.
He had a little stove inside and burned kindling wood and old rolled up newspapers as he glided from one mailbox to the next.
In later years, Jake got a Model A, and folks still talk about the time out on his route when he noticed one tire going flat. He fixed the inner tube’s tiny hole with a two-cent postage stamp. At least that’s what he bragged about to the elbow-benders spinning on stools down at Leonard’s Bar when he got back to town.
As kids we would watch for him from our lace-curtained front room bay window. Each of us wanted to be the first to spot him and Jenny slogging silently up over the hill.
One very cold and very windy January day when the snow was knee deep to horse withers, we spotted a faint trail of smoke from Old Jake’s stove even before he and Jenny crested the rise.
Jenny soon appeared, leaning mightily against the wind that was blowing like 60.
A fair-sized snow bank had built up by our mailbox, and it prevented Jenny from snuggling up close. We could tell Jenny, a creature of habit, wasn’t too happy about that, and neither was Old Jake, who usually just reached out of his wagon house and put our mail in the box.
This time, as Jenny nervously shifted foot to foot, Jake had to get out of his warm little mobile home and walk several steps. We watched him open the little door on his tiny house and goose-step through the snow to the mailbox.
His neck scarf flapped in that terrible wind, and its flailings made Jenny even more skittish. Old Jake’s Ichabod Crane neck was down between his shoulders like a fox-teased turtle.
He slogged back through the snow to his little house, and reached up to open the side door, which had been blown shut, much to the dislike of nervous Jenny, trying to watch the goings on behind her.
Jake was just swinging up one long leg when a nasty gust of wind slammed in and hit the door like a fat goose landing on ice. The door slammed shut.
With it, caught on the door, was one of Old Jake’s pant legs. He hopped around on his one free leg in a freezing war dance, but he couldn’t reach the door handle because his spindly legs were longer than his skinny arms.
Meanwhile, Jenny assumed that he was back aboard and started to resume her long winter’s journey. But a call from Jake stopped Jenny in her tracks.
To escape his predicament, Jake flopped down in the snow with one leg hanging from the door, and commenced to squirm right out of his overcoat and then out of his bib overalls. Down to his long johns, he was free and able to open the door. With the long john’s back flap flapping, he jumped inside clutching his pants, and resumed his route.
That evening at supper, we giggled as we told the folks the story. And later that night at the pool hall, Dad was there and said he waited to hear Old Jake relate the story of his latest “innovative move.”
But Jake was quiet and hardly said a thing, Dad told us.
In fact, Old Jake went home early that night, complaining of a cold.
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