Mailman's Mailman

The telephone rang in the wedge-shaped Washington office of Jesse M. Donaldson, the First Assistant Postmaster General. Picking it up, Donaldson heard a voice say: "This is the President."

With the air of a man who suspects that his caller is playing a practical joke but is willing to string along for a while, Donaldson replied: "Yes, Mr. President." "Your boss has just resigned," said the voice. Donaldson knew that Postmaster General Bob Hannegan had just quit to buy the St. Louis Cardinals (see SPORT).

"I just heard that," Donaldson said. "I'm sorry about it."

"I'm appointing you Postmaster General," the voice continued, "if you want it."

Boy & Man. It was Harry Truman's own idea to make a career man--and not a politician--his Postmaster General. Not since Benjamin Franklin, who held the job from 1775 to 1776; had there been a PMG who actually knew something about the postal service when he took office.*

Big Jesse Donaldson, 62, knows almost everything about the department whose 385,000 employees daily serve more of the U.S. people than any other Government bureau. Two years ago he got about as high as a letter carrier could hope to get.

If anybody ever was, he is a born mailman. His father was a fourth-class postmaster at Hanson, a hamlet in southern Illinois. When he was 18, Jesse. started clerking, at $11 a week, at his father's postal counter during the summer months. Winters he taught school. At 23, he gave up his $85 a month teaching job to become a $50 a month letter carrier in Shelbyville, Ill.

Coops & Coups. At 30 Donaldson passed rigorous tests to join the select ranks of postal inspectors--the trusted men who safeguard the mails, protect the public from thefts and frauds, keep the service 99.9% honest. Postal inspection is the oldest and least publicized investigative and crime detection agency of the Government. Thoroughness and cold efficiency are its tenets. Donaldson served as an inspector in Kansas City for 17 years, sometimes as "the guy in the coop." (In large postoffices there are concealed, peep-holed galleries from 'which inspectors watch clerks and sorters suspected of mail thefts.)

Donaldson trained his eye for swindlers; he also became a relentless pursuer of facts & figures in fraud cases. Among those he helped to convict: the late Dr. Frederick E. Cook, the polar explorer, for mail fraud. The catch which gained Donaldson promotion was his tracking down of a long-wanted train robber.

"Yours Very Truly." As a postal administrator in Washington the last 14 years, Donaldson is still a stranger to most of the town's politicians. He had had a nodding acquaintance with County Judge Harry Truman in Kansas City in the '20s, but in Washington has seen him only infrequently. For the past year he has sometimes sat in at Cabinet meetings for often-absent Bob Hannegan; but he spoke only when spoken to.

Congressmen wondered if Harry Truman might go one historic step farther and do the politically unthinkable: let Donaldson pick his postmasters out of the ranks, on merit, They inquired hopefully about his life, his friends, his foibles and hobbies--and found that he is a very unpolitical person. They did learn that he is a registered Democrat, a Methodist, and a Mason; that he likes flashy ties, and sometimes closes a conversation as he would a letter with "Yours very truly." They also learned that, in his off hours, he pores over a stamp collection.

* When the Continental Congress gave Franklin the job of organizing a postal service, it got an experienced hand as well as a wise politician. He had been Britain's Deputy Postmaster General for the American Colonies for 22 years. As a British official he had signed his postal frank: "Free; B. Franklin." After 1775 he signed it: "Be Free; Franklin."

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