TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Theresa Birdsong hung out in the small front room of the Fellows post office Friday, filling out a "Postal Service Customer Questionnaire." The local mail carrier shot the breeze with Birdsong, who muttered and joked as she wrote down her answers.

"For which of the following do you leave your community? (Check all that apply)," one question asked. When she got to the "social needs" option, Birdsong let out a guffaw.

"Social needs," she said, "I come to the post office for those!"

The survey, distributed to Fellows post office customers at a community meeting July 6, will be used to gauge the possible impact of closing the facility.

For the approximately 150-person town in the heart of the Midway oil field, residents say the impact would be great -- in terms of local gathering places, Fellows doesn't have much else.

But the United States Postal Service has been closing post offices nationwide to balance its massively lopsided budget, agency spokesman Richard Maher said.

"A lot of people don't understand we don't operate on tax dollars," Maher said. "We operate like a business."

And business has been bad.

The volume of mail sent through the postal service has decreased by 20 percent over the past three years, Maher said, helping saddle the USPS with more than $15 billion in net losses.

Americans just don't communicate the way they used to.

"Of course we're under a lot of pressure to reduce costs," he said.

While Maher said "there are no offices exempt" from consolidation or closure, USPS spokesman James Wigdel said the Fellows branch is the only one in Kern County in this phase of consideration.

"The meeting they had last week was the first step in what we would call discontinuance," Maher said. "The next step in the process is to develop the proposal on the future of the post office, which will be posted, then the public has 60 days to comment before the final decision is made."

Maher said the proposal would involve switching the Fellows zip code from a full-service post office to a neighborhood delivery and collection box for residents who have P.O. boxes.

The one rural delivery route in Fellows wouldn't change, Maher said. The same mail carrier would operate out of the Taft post office instead of a separate office in Fellows.

But for some of the town's residents, many of whose families have lived in the area for generations, the presence of familiar faces in a familiar setting makes a crucial difference.

Teena Simmons, a pre-school teacher and lifelong Fellows resident, scoffed at the idea of using the postal service's website, which was offered as a potential alternative to the agency's current functions.

"Yeah, like I want to mail a package up online," she said.

Simmons said without the actual post office, many elderly residents would be cut off, and not just from postal service.

"We have a lot of old people who don't know how to use a computer. They probably don't even have computers." she said. "This is their livelihood, coming in here and getting to say hi to people."

Simmons chatted a bit more with the two women behind the counter, then headed out with the day's mail.

Birdsong has lived in nearby Derby Acres for 32 years, she said, as do all of her children and grandchildren. Before she retired, Birdsong worked at Midway School in Fellows.

Birdsong said she receives carrier service at home, but she still comes to the Fellows post office three or four times per week.

Sometimes she picks up mail and sometimes, Birdsong said, she comes in "just to chit-chat."

"It's real friendly," she said of the Fellows office.

Birdsong said she's never even been into the McKittrick post office, even though it's technically closer to home, because she said "it's not very personal."

And Birdsong certainly didn't want to drive the 15 miles from her house to Taft.

"You go to the Taft one and they don't even talk to you," she said.

For the USPS, though, the Taft office's proximity was one factor in particular that made Fellows stand out as a possible candidate for closure.

Another was the fact that the Fellows post office is operating without a postmaster.

"A lot of the positions in the last year as they've been coming up have not been filled," Maher said.

Though Maher emphasized that USPS tries its best to accommodate all of a community's concerns when consolidating its postal services, he said he couldn't think off the top of his head of an instance when a community feedback meeting had been held and the office in question had not closed.

A plaque on the wall in the Fellows post office notes the building, essentially a trailer, was dedicated in 1982. Yellowing notices from the Santa Fe Energy Company dated 1984 hang from a bulletin board.

Residents said the post office has had a place in the community even farther back than that.

Susan Wagner said her grandmother worked at the Fellows post office, and her cousin Linda Kaldenberg was postmaster for 25 years before retiring. According to a USPS online database, Kaldenberg was the most recent Fellows postmaster.

"I think it's sad," Wagner said.

Though Phil Kessler said he too "feel(s) bad," he can see why it might be necessary to close the post office.

"I don't mail anything," he said. And when he does for work at Bakersfield Pipe and Supply, "UPS comes to your place of business."

Kessler lives in Bakersfield but picks up his business' mail at the Fellows post office about once a week. He said a cafe and store that used to draw oil field workers to the area near the post office have closed.

And once people move out of Fellows, new ones rarely replace them.

"It's just starting to die off," he said.

Wagner noted that local residents sometimes "sell out to Chevron," and that there are "not too many people" who come through the post office.

"Still," she said, "this is my home."