Crystal Beach residents prefer to keep their old-fashioned post office box mail system rather than shift to home delivery.
By NORA KOCH
Published March 7, 2004
CRYSTAL BEACH - For this gulfside fishing village's 1,200 or so residents, 34681 isn't just a zip code.
It's a way of life.
Here there are no mailboxes at the ends of driveways or on front porches and no mail trucks meandering down the streets.
Instead, for Crystal Beach residents, the daily routine includes a trip to the post office to pick up mail and packages from post office boxes inside the lobby of the stamp-sized building on Crystal Beach Avenue, next to the Pinellas Trail.
Since the first post office in this unincorporated area opened in November 1914, the post office has been a natural center in this bucolic old-Florida village, where sleepy oaks tower and some roads remain unpaved.
"It's like the social hub, the chamber of commerce and the lost-and-found," said postal clerk Jo Picardat, 43, who has sorted the mail, worked the counter and built a second family over the past seven years.
Neighbors catch up outside the slate-blue and white building, Girl Scouts sell cookies and civic association members hawk raffle tickets. Parents find piano teachers and teenagers advertise baby-sitting services. Lost pets get found, and it's prime real estate for a lemonade stand.
"If you need any information disseminated in Crystal Beach, the post office is the place," said Rick Barasso, 49, the village's honorary mayor, a title doled out annually to the resident who raises the most money for the local civic association.
Crystal Beach is one of the Postal Service's two non-delivery offices in Pinellas County. The other is a few miles south in Ozona. There are about 40 more in the postal service's southwest Florida region, which includes 135 post offices and stretches from Brooksville south to the Everglades and from the gulf to about halfway across the state.
Crystal Beach and Ozona residents could formally ask the post office to consider implementing delivery service.
But although some gripe about limited package pickup hours and not enough parking outside the Crystal Beach post office, only one person has ever even started to make the request, and they didn't follow through, said Postmaster Jeff Mitchell, 45, who has been there about a year. If such a request went through, home delivery also could mean closing the Crystal Beach operation and changing mailing addresses to Palm Harbor.
Attorney David Chianco, 42, wouldn't have it any other way.
For the past decade, he has stopped by the post office once or twice a day to check the mail, buy stamps or send packages. Soon Chianco, his wife Angela, and daughter Macayla, 8, will move to Ozona, where residents can have home delivery - if they are willing to have a Palm Harbor address.
Or, for $24 a year, the Chiancos can have an Ozona address and a post office box. Chianco said they will probably pay for a box and make daily post office visits to keep "that old Florida feel."
For the Chianco family, the Crystal Beach post office has served as a pet lost and found, and Macayla and a friend set up a lemonade stand one Saturday. Each girl made $76.
Mickie Flinner, 69, stops by the post office every night on her way home from work. Not to get the mail, which her husband, Buss, usually does. About four years ago the Flinners noticed that no one was watering the plants put out beneath the overhang, and the trees and flowers were dying.
So the Flinners made it their job. In the morning Mickie fills two gallon jugs with water, and waters the plants at night.
Mickie Flinner says she prefers the P.O. box method to delivery, for security, and because it helps foster an "old home town" vibe here.
"I know everybody on my street and I think I have a key to everyone's house," said Flinner, a paralegal who moved to Crystal Beach in 1980.
In recent years, Flinner noted, Crystal Beach has been changing from a sleepy community with streets lined with conch homes. Property values rose 140 percent in Crystal Beach from 1998 to mid-2003, according to a Times analysis. Through July of last year, the area's median home sales price had reached $290,000.
Even with the influx of newer, richer residents, the town has stayed true to its postal roots, Flinner said.
Of course, everyone has to stop by the post office to get their mail. But residents say the postal workers help foster community spirit by making it a pleasant experience. In 1998 Postmaster Miriam Blohm retired after 23 years in the Crystal Beach post office. She knew everyone by name and was a fixture of the community.
Today Picardat is the fixture. Most mornings she sorts mail into 780 P.O. boxes, usually about 100 parcels and 11 feet of stacked mail.
In a drawer behind the counter she keeps a tin filled with tiny bone-shaped dog treats, with a faded yellow Post-it note listing Crystal Beach's canine population and their owners' postal box numbers. On most Saturdays, she sets a biscuit in each box among the envelopes and packages.
She knows almost everyone. When she notices a regular customer hasn't emptied their box for a few days, she'll call their home to make sure everything is okay. Twice she's found older residents in need of help: one who had broken a hip and another who was locked inside her home.
Customers bring her handwritten valentines, holiday gifts, and the occasional baked goods. They ask about her son. They send postcards from vacation, and she asks about their lives.
Before he got the job here, Mitchell, a second-generation postmaster, would visit Crystal Beach and Ozona and hope that he could one day be part of the operation.
Will Crystal Beach ever change over to home delivery? Mitchell doesn't know, but he has an opinion.
