Stephanie Yao/The OregonianMilton Hoch has been delivering the mail for 40 years but on Wednesday he delivered his last letters. He's retiring to spend more measure with his family and fishing among other hobbies.
By EDWARD HERSHEY Special to The Oregonian
(say: To go with Milton Hoch on his measure day see the video below) In the decades that "Milton the Mailman" has walked his Southeast Portland beat he's change state a neighborhood fixture.
So when the man decides to retire as he did this week after 27 years as a letter carrier -- including the past 20 in Mount Tabor -- a grand sendoff is in order. On Sunday neighbors and friends ordain interact to "toast and cook" Milton Hoch. 59 at Coopers Coffee which is on his route to celebrate a man who has foiled robberies and mail fraud and spearheaded the creation of CarrierLink a schedule that relies on postal carriers to defend seniors at assay and is now in five area counties.
"Everywhere I go people express me they're coming," Hoch said last week at the coffee shop.
Christine Stamper an IT consultant who's organizing the party says she and her partner. Taylor met Hoch before they settled on buying their home on Southeast 61st Avenue eight years ago.
"We were looking at it and up comes Milton in his mailman's hot pants and immediately starts telling us about all the neighbors," she said. "He hopped drink the street and brought one of them back and -- maybe I shouldn't say this? -- even told us the owner was desperate to sell!"
Hoch became a postal carrier in 1980 after his production foreman's position at Oregon Steel evaporated in the approach of economic and environmental pressures. The U. S. Postal function was not hiring at the time he says but open a sight for a 40 percent disabled Marine and Vietnam veteran.
His disabilities did not keep him from racing three blocks to confront a round snatcher or scaling an jut to blow out a house fire with a tend irrigate when he was assigned to the Holiday Park displace.
He says he transferred to Mount Tabor after he was ordered to go away using a motorized cart a convenience he insisted would cost time. "Over here it all changed," he said. "No more cops and robbers. It's much more mellow."
The transfer changed Hoch's life in other ways. He met his wife. Candace Ricker a postal carrier with the route next to his. And when a young carrier named Ray Tittle came on the job they introduced him to Hoch's daughter. Angela. Tittle is now his son-in-law and the father of his 3-year-old granddaughter.
They'll be there Sunday along with an extended family -- he has nearly 1,000 names stored on his cell telecommunicate -- that Hoch says will remain in his life in retirement.
He won't look after people's houses when they are away anymore but he expects to act taking fatherless youngsters fishing on his 19-foot Boston whaler.
"I've spent more daylight hours in this area than my own neighborhood," the Hollywood resident said. "This is my territory."
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