We decorated our bar with both street and other interesting signs that we gathered clandestinely. Unfortunately guests sometimes considered them cute and stole them. So the Social Chairman, P11, got the bright idea of offering a fifth of whiskey as the prize for the best sign brought in to replenish our stock. This triggered a very intense competition. On a trip back from New York, one crew grabbed the 8’ tall Connecticut State Trooper sign that welcomed travelers to Connecticut, which was sticking out of their trunk as they cruised through the tolls on the Merit Parkway. (The fact that they stole the one on the NY side rather than waiting to get the one on the MA side probably said something about their driving condition.) This was depressing to P3, P9, and myself since it would be very hard to top.
However, you can’t keep good men down. As we were driving to Winchester around 2 AM, we passed one of those four-legged storage mailboxes you see on corners. It occurred to us that a federal offense had to outrank a state offense, so if we took the mailbox we would win the fifth. Armed with that logic, we stopped and tried to grab the mailbox. However, the USPS had anticipated that and had hooks buried in the ground to prevent it being hauled away. I am still fuzzy about how we got the anchor out of the ground, but we did. It wouldn’t fit in the trunk but we had a convertible, so we put the top down and set it in the back seat, covering it with our shirts. We drove it back to PK to demand our prize. Fortunately there weren’t many people out at 3AM because our disguise was a little suspicious with three guys driving in their T-shirts with the top down in 40 degree weather.
We woke up P11 to claim our prize. Sadly, he was fairly sober and wanted no part of a mailbox. Nor did the President, who happened to be P10 in his maturing phase. So, the mailbox was put on the front stoop. The cops were called and told someone had played a prank on us.
Alas, the story didn’t end there. That summer, as luck would have it, I was resting my eyes on a couch in the Reception Room on the first floor, recovering from the previous evening’s revels, when the doorbell rang, rather insistently. I was the closest and answered it. The guy at the door flashed a badge. He was a postal inspector and said he wanted to talk about the mailbox.
I didn’t see a lot of options, so I invited him in, planning on relying on the prank story we had used when calling the cops. He asked for my name. When I gave it, he checked a list, looked up at me, and asked, “Did you steal the mailbox?” Oops. Because of my misspent youth, I knew that my fingerprints were in the system. I also remembered twisting, tugging, and lifting the mailbox from every possible direction so my prints would have been all over it. (At 3 AM you do not think of things like wiping the box down.) Ordinarily, I might have tried to brass it out, but my teeth were itching from my hangover and I wouldn’t have been able to match wits with a caterpillar. So, I confessed. I wouldn’t tell him who else was involved, so he told me to get the other guys and be in his office the next week — or else. I called P3 and P9 and, fortunately for me, they showed up. Nothing happened and I imagine the story brought a little levity into the dreary lives of the USPS postal inspectors.