Giesken named Maryville postmaster

TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Becky Giesken is the new postmaster of the Maryville Post Office. A 10-year U.S. Postal Service veteran, Giesken is now the top manager responsible for all of Maryville’s city and rural routes in addition to mail service in the surrounding communities of Burlington Junction, Clearmont, Elmo, Hopkins, Pickering, Ravenwood, Guilford, Skidmore, and Graham.

The U.S. Postal Service office in Maryville has a new postmaster.

Becky Giesken, who has worked at the local office for the entire 10 years of her Postal Service career, was named to the position following the June resignation of Paul Eschbacher, who left the independent U.S. government agency to begin a new career overseas.

Giesken joined the Maryville Post Office staff in 2006 and spent two years as a city mail carrier before being promoted first to clerk and then to supervisor, the position she had held since 2012.

Now that Giesken has moved into the postmaster’s office, post office staffer Kenny Beattie is serving as acting supervisor until USPS management selects her permanent successor.

As supervisor, Giesken acted as Eschbacher’s top manager, filling in for the postmaster whenever he was absent and helping supervise the office’s 45 employees, about 30 of who are assigned to the Maryville location with the remainder working out of rural offices scattered across Nodaway County.

Those locations include USPS facilities in Burlington Junction, Clearmont, Elmo, Hopkins, Pickering, Ravenwood, Guilford, and Skidmore. Maryville personnel also service two 16-slot “cluster boxes” set up in Graham after the office there was closed due to structural failures that rendered the building where it was housed unsafe.

Giesken grew up in Pickering and worked at the now-closed Energizer battery plant in Maryville before beginning her postal career. She graduated from North Nodaway High School in 1993 and attended York College in Nebraska before returning to the Maryville area. Her husband, Luke Giesken, works at Giesken Repair & Welding in Wilcox.

In an era of email and large private parcel carriers like Federal Express and United Parcel Service, Giesken said one of her biggest challenges will be to “keep customers using the Postal Service,” which she described as “the most reliable government agency there is.”

Until 1971, the service was a cabinet-level department of the federal government. Since then, however, it has operated much like a private business, albeit one established under the U.S. Constitution and empowered to act as a quasi-governmental agency with the exclusive legal right to deliver first-class and third-class mail.

Like Eschbacher before her, Giesken said one of her most important tasks will be to work with business owners and other customers to ensure that the post office is meeting their requirements as efficiently and economically as possible.

“We’re going to keep doing our job the very best we can do it,” she said.

Giesken is also responsible for consistent and timely delivery along six city and 10 rural routes originating in Maryville as well as one rural route based out of Ravenwood and another out of Hopkins.

While a lot of folks may think the post office operates during what is basically an eight-hour day five days a week and a half-day on Saturday, Giesken said the reality is that postal workers staffing various shifts are on the job for 10 or 11 hours a day, six days a week.

Typically, she said, the process of sorting, loading and delivering the mail begins at 7 o’clock in the morning and continues until around 6:30 p.m. Tasks range from delivering the largest packages to selling a single first-class stamp to a customer mailing a greeting card.

It’s a busy place, and Giesken said that despite the steep drop in the amount of first-class mail caused by email and texting, the post office handles an increasing amount of parcel post, which totals around 650 parcels a day during the summer and at least 800 parcels a day during the school year. Volume escalates even more during the November-December holiday season.

Giesken added that the Postal Service is the only mail and package service in the country that will send anything anywhere to anyone.

“We can get that letter to you no matter where you live,” she said. “In some parts of the country, we use boats and dogsleds. There are places where other companies don’t deliver, but we do.”