As of December 31, Deb Matthiesen has retired after 35 years with the United States Postal Service.
Matthiesen told the Gazette that she started at the distribution plant in Sioux Falls in 1988, doing various tasks, working with sorting machines, mail deliveries and routes. In 1992, when the USPS did its major reorganization, she got her first promotion shortly thereafter.
“I’d done various different jobs at the plant,” Matthiesen said. “But that’s when I got my first managerial position. In 1995, my husband and I moved to an acreage outside of Garretson. I continued to work at the post office in Sioux Falls, but in 2001 the Garretson postmaster retired and I was selected to become the new postmaster here.”
“I was pretty excited about it, both for the job itself and for the first time I would have weekends off. My shift in Sioux Falls, I had Mondays and Tuesdays off. Now the full weekends didn’t last as I did start driving some of our Saturday routes however, but that was all right. I also really enjoyed the change of pace.”
“At the plant in Sioux Falls, the work never stops, you just do your work and continue until your shift ends and the next one takes over and continues where you left off. In Garretson and post offices like it, you run the show; you do everything, you sort, you deliver, you open the store, you help the customer and do every little thing the post office does, but you and your team handle it all yourselves, until you close at the end of the day and the last driver goes home. That provides a kind of satisfaction, knowing you got the job done for that day, and you’re ready to start the next one.”
Matthiesen has also been a very active member of the Garretson Volunteer Ambulance Service.
“It’s something I’m extremely proud of, that I enjoy doing and that I will continue to do,” she said. “I will probably be doing it more often now.”
“I do want to talk especially about that for a minute. In my role as Postmaster, I get to know a lot of people face to face, and the number of people who’ve gotten to know me is amazing to me sometimes. Working with the Ambulance, I can’t convey to you the number of times that it’s helped me in my work. When you get to a scene, people are scared and greatly concerned. When they see somebody they know, when they see a friendly face, it helps in ways you can’t imagine. We have an excellent squad of Firefighters, Fire/Rescue team and the very best ambulance crew you can imagine, and we all work very well together. I’m proud to serve with them. It’s one of the many reasons I enjoy living in this community.”
Since the 1980s, how the post office operates and delivers the mail has changed drastically. Nelson said that she recalls a time where there were no computers on the sorting floor and only a few in the offices. Now, they’re everywhere and everything throughout the mailing system is managed by computers, from forms and package tracking to regular meetings.
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“By far though, the biggest change is volume,” she said. “Volume has steadily decreased while costs have continuously increased. These things are related. We still must make our deliveries to every customer, wherever they are, and if we have less volume overall, then it’s less resources we can draw from to make those deliveries. You started seeing it more in the 1990s as email, the internet and other electronic communications became mainstream. Even with the spikes of the advent of online shopping and COVID, volume is still down and in decline.”
Garretson though, as in many things, bucks this trend a bit.
“We have a strong local business community that uses our Postal Service for large parts of their business needs. Alliance Communications, Nordstrom’s Auto, and Garbage N More with their regular postcards, all of these businesses have helped keep our local post office strong for our area.”
As she worked her final days at USPS as 2023 likewise ended, Matthiesen said that she was feeling a bit nostalgic.
“What I will miss, is seeing the people,” she told us. “That personal contact is wonderful. Helping a customer find a lost package. As I’ve got thirty-five years of experience in the postal service, I know how things work and how the system works and I’m usually able to figure out what went wrong and where, and I can locate the missing letter or package. It hasn’t really hit me yet, in a lot of ways I can’t believe I’m done. I just want to say thank you to everyone for your patronage and friendship.”
Matthiesen said that she’s looking forward to being a farm wife and a grandma, and aside from continuing to work with the ambulance, she might do a bit of traveling and vacationing too.
Mike VanWhe is taking over as the new postmaster for the Garretson post office and was installed in the job as of Dec. 28th, 2023. Look for an introductory profile article with him in an upcoming issue of this newspaper.
UPDATE 1/8/24: A prior known last name of Nelson was used in the printed edition of the article. This has been corrected in the online version.
