Post office strips walls of Bates cartoons

By MARY BROWNFIELD

Published: June 23, 2006

BYE-BYE Bill Bates.

A U.S. Postal Service “retail standardization team” swept through the Fifth Avenue post office in downtown Carmel last week, decreeing nothing could hang on the walls but USPS paraphernalia. No more lost-dog signs, Forest Theater playbills or psychic-reading fliers may be tacked to bulletin boards in the wood-paneled box lobby. And the collection of Bill Bates’ classic Carmel cartoons came down from the walls of the front office for good.

“We have to comply,” said acting postmaster Carlos Santiago, though he’s hoping to reason with the powers that be. “It’s happening everywhere.”

It’s not a new rule, “but apparently it’s never been enforced at that facility,” he said.

He contacted Bates to see what should be done with the framed drawings, which entertained patrons standing in slow-moving lines and captivated visitors for years.

The scene of a parking officer chalking the legs of tourists standing at the curb. The giant stuffed inside builder Hugh Comstock’s charming Tuck Box. The little old lady standing on the back of the large man so she could open her high-up mailbox while he opened his on the bottom row. And firefighters yelling, “Forget the house, save the trees!” Those were just a few of the favorites that hung in rows on the post office walls. All of the works were first published in The Pine Cone after Bates became the paper’s resident cartoonist in 1972.

“It’s not that [postal officials] didn’t like them,” Santiago said. “They love the cartoons — they’re just not allowed to have those up.”

The downtown post office is undergoing a general sprucing up, according to Santiago. Bulletin boards had everything removed save postal service posters pitching stamps and Priority Mail, though the glassed-in board displaying city announcements can stay.

The beloved old boxes and wood paneling will not change, Santiago confirmed.

“Right now we’re just painting the inside and trying to standardize the window area,” he said.

The box lobby last received a new coat of paint sometime in the 1960s.

Santiago said Thursday he contacted Bates and the “retail standardization team,” and he plans to seek permission to hang the Bates cartoons in the box lobby, which is separate from the area where postal workers interact with customers. He also wants to make one bulletin board available for community notices.

“In Pebble Beach, I’m the postmaster, and we have pictures in the lobby area,” he said. “Though we are going to do standardization over there, too.”