After growing up in Eminence and graduating from high school in the small Shannon County town, Ann Tottingham set out to become a teacher and attended Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield (now Missouri State University).
But in 1982, Tottingham took a job in the Houston Post Office, and 33 years later she’s still employed by the U.S. Postal Service. Her career as a postal worker entered a new phase this year, when on March 31 she became postmaster at Summersville.
“I had everything I needed for a teaching degree, but I was offered the job in Houston,” Tottingham said. “It stuck.”
When she started delivering mail in Houston, Tottingham became the town’s first-ever female mail carrier.
“I remember delivering mail to the senior center, and an older lady there told me, ‘you’re women’s lib in action,’” she said. “I never saw myself that way, but that generation had not seen women in the work force like that. That was a man’s job.”
As Summersville postmaster, Tottingham is following in the footsteps of her mother, Virginia Combs, who held the position from May 1982 to September 1993. She is the wife Houston mayor Don Tottingham, who is also a long-time postal worker and retired in 2012 after close to 26 years of service.
Before taking the lead spot at Summersville, Tottingham was in a supervisory role at the Salem post office beginning last June. During her lengthy stint in Houston, she moved from being a carrier to a clerk and was “loaned out” to many other offices that were short-handed or otherwise needed help, including Fort Leonard Wood, Hartville, Licking, Rolla, Salem, Springfield and St. James. She also worked as an “officer in charge” (OIC) at Eminence, Hartshorn and Vichy.
At times along the way, Tottingham would even get behind the wheel of a delivery vehicle and be a rural carrier.
“You sometimes do a lot in smaller offices,” she said.
The best part of being in postal service has been interacting with people, Tottingham said.
“I really miss walking around and delivering,” she said. “You really get to know the people on your route; you’re good neighbors – sometimes your mail carrier is one of the best neighbors there is, especially in rural communities where you have people who you’ve cared about for years. And that’s good.”
Tottingham recalls instances where postal workers went beyond the call of duty to help people in their communities, like a time when bottled water was delivered to fire victims and another when Sunday school literature was brought just in time to someone who was unable to get to the post office during the week.
“That’s why I wanted to be in a small office – I wanted to be a part of that kind of thing,” she said.
The Summersville office lacks most of the digital-age technology common to most larger offices. The “manual office,” as Tottingham called it, has one clerk who works the counter, while delivery routes operate out of Mountain View following USPS cutback rearrangements about a year ago.
Over time, Tottingham has seen more than a few odd packages in the mail.
“When I first started, there would be live goldfish coming to the Ben Franklin store,” she said. “You get chicks and bees, and I’ve seen coconuts from Hawaii come through without any packing.”
When she became a supervisor, Tottingham found out there’s a lot to the USPS’ old unofficial motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
“It was hard this past winter when the weather was so horrible,” she said. “We had 15 routes out of the office, and we have to deliver the mail every day. The hardest thing I’ve ever done in this line of work was having to tell people, ‘go out there and do your best – and don’t have an accident.’
“I don’t think that’s fair – I would rather do it myself than send somebody else.”