‘Some kind of record’ — Cape Cottage Postmaster Annie Burke honored for 66 years of service

Retired Cape Elizabeth Postmaster Ann Burke, seated,
was honored Jan. 17 by, from left, Town Council Chairman
Sara Lennon, Councilor Kathryn Ray and Acting Portland
Postmaster Regina Bugbee. (Courtesy photo)

CAPE ELIZABETH — Today, there’s little indication the bucolic neighborhood outside the main gate to Fort Williams Park was ever a bustling community in its own right. The final curtain fell on the Cape Cottage Theater a long time ago, the old casino was repurposed as a daycare, and there’s no sign, not even a depression in the pavement, of the trolley tracks that served both.

Across the street from the park entrance, the trolley also stopped at Armstrong’s General Store, where the men and woman who worked at Fort Williams when it was a military base would pick up various sundries, trade stories, and maybe send a package from the small post office inside.

The store closed decades ago, but the post office remained, quietly serving the community year after year until it was all that remained to differentiate Cape Cottage from any other place in Cape Elizabeth. And then, in October, it, too, passed into history.

But residents of the town aren’t quite ready to forget Annie Burke, the small woman with the big smile who ran the post office. Recently, town officials presented Burke, 94, with a plaque recognizing her tenure as the Cape Cottage postmaster – an amazing 66 years, more than half of the 113 years the office was open.

“When you think about it, that really has to be some kind of a record,” says Burke’s daughter, Carol Brown, an accountant for South Portland High School.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure,

“I think it’s safe to make a general statement that Ms. Burke was both one of the oldest and longest-serving postmasters – there’s no question about that. But we just don’t keep personnel records on our contract employees,” said Thomas Rizzo, spokesman for the Northern New England District of the U.S. Postal Service. “While we know she was there for 66 years, and clearly that makes her one of, if not the longest-serving contract employees at the postal service, the kind of records we would need to prove it just don’t exist.”

As a contract office, Burke had to bid every so often in order to retain the Postal Service account, much in the way many rural route carriers do. Often, Brown says, her mother would “low-ball” the bid, to make sure nobody else got it, making ends meet as a single mother of two young children by babysitting, taking in ironing and selling soap she made in her kitchen sink.

One of Burke’s soap customers was the film actress Bette Davis, who called Cape Elizabeth home.

“She was very nice,” said Burke on Wednesday, while reminiscing in the now-closed post office, where cards, photos and other mementos from more than six decades cover nearly every inch of wall space.

“She [Davis] used to want to come in when it was quiet,” said Burke, with a chuckle. “I used to tell her when to come in, when nobody else would be here, which wasn’t too often.

“From morning until I closed it was go, go, go,” she said. “The door always opened. It never closed, it seemed, until I closed it at night. I enjoyed it very much, right up until the day I dropped on the floor.”

That was about 18 months ago, when Burke fell in the back room of the post office and broke her pelvis. She stayed the course, however, and continued to hold the contract, with her husband, Wallace Decker, handling most of the heavy lifting.

The post office might be open still. Despite its small two-room size, and limited number of post office boxes (just 81), the Cape Cottage branch was not on last year’s list of 34 post offices slated for closure. But then Wally Burke’s health also began to falter, and on Oct. 30, Annie Burke locked the door for the last time.

“I really enjoyed it,” says Burke, of her service. “I miss it very much now. I always seem to want to go to the door and greet somebody who’s not there.”

Annie Burke was born in Lewiston as Ann Williams. Her early life was spent being shuttled from home to home as a foster child.

“It was a tough, tough, terrible life,” Brown says of her mother’s early biography. “She struggled her whole life, but you’d never know it. You’d think someone that had that kind of a life would have a little bitterness, but she loves people. She’s such a happy person.”

Burke was living with a family in Biddeford and attending school in Portland when she landed a part-time job at the Cape Cottage branch post office. Asked how she got the position, Burke, sharp-witted as ever is quick to quip, “Oh, I just came with the pony express, I guess.”

Annie Burke, Cape Cottage postmaster from 1945
to 2011, is shown at work in undated photo
from the mid-1950s. (Courtesy photo)

That was in 1940, and, truth to tell, the postmaster at the time, widow Molly Armstrong, was looking for someone she could trust, and Burke came with solid references.

The Cape Cottage branch opened in 1898 – the same year the casino opened and the military batteries at Fort Williams were completed – when Joseph Armstrong won a contract to open a post office inside his general store, on Shore Road.

Armstrong’s son, Harvard, eventually took over the business, which passed to his wife, Molly, upon his death. By the time Burke came on the scene, the store had closed and Armstrong was running the post office only, making due on the sale of stamps, which were then 3 cents each.

Molly, says Burke, was the best boss ever, more like a mother than anything else. Still, Burke had not planned to stay on. Fueled by an impulse she can no longer explain, Burke has signed up for a “detective school” in Washington, D.C.

"I was all ready to go, had my ticket and everything," Burke explained in a 2009 interview with The Current. "Then Molly came in one day and begged me not to leave. It broke my heart to see her get on her hands and knees, so I decided I would stay."

                                

By 1945, now a windowed mother of 3-year-old Carol, Burke took over the post office as Armstrong’s health began to fail. When Armstrong died, she left the building to Burke, who converted the cavernous lobby that has been the general store into living quarters, while the post office took on its cramped, two-room configuration. Soon afterward, Burke lost a second husband, leaving her alone with a 6-month-old son, Phil, and Carol, then 11.

And so, Burke did the best she could, bidding low enough to keep her post office contract year after year, while selling soap to movie stars and doing whatever else she had to to make ends met, with never a whisper of complaint.

“I kept right up with it, as the stamps changed, I changed,” she says, with the most matter-of-fact of Yankee shrugs.

But for a time, it may have seemed like Burke was the only thing that didn’t change. As the destination on packages changed from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, life inside in the Cape Cottage Post Office remained the one constant the community could count on. Walk in on almost any day for more than 60 years and you were sure to find a lost child who’d homed in on the safest place to wait for a hastily-called parent, a mailman lingering from his appointed rounds over Burke’s fresh-baked bread, or a box-holder who’d come in for no other reason than to pass a few moments with the most affable face in town. And, of course, there were Burke’s ever-present cats, who, though they had free reign of the office, most often perched on her shoulder as she counted out sheets of stamps.

And all the while, as days gave way to decades, the walls of the Cape Cottage post office continued to collect little treasures, as if it was the collective refrigerator door of the community.

“I do miss it,” said Burke. “I had wonderful box holders. They were all fine people. You couldn’t live in a better community. We were so fortunate to have found such a wonderful place. I will always feel that my time here was well worth it.

“I hope it will never fade,” says Burke, “that people will always remember there was a little post office here.”

Unfortunately, the Postal Service took the old-fashioned P.O. boxes late last month, leaving a gaping hole in the wall between the rooms of the closed branch. Rizzo says the Postal Service has no real use for them, and that they will “probably be recycled.”

“We’ve received no official request [for them] from any source,” said Rizzo.

Still, even if the boxes she tended for so long don’t get preserved, Annie Burke’s memory will live on in many ways.

Last spring, the Cape Elizabeth High School Wind Symphony debuted a four-movement piece written by University of New Hampshire music professor Andrew Boysen. Collectively titled “Cape Elizabeth Sketches,” each 12-minute section is named for one of the town’s most famous residents.  Davis’ eponymous piece appears placid at first, but then trembles with boiling undertones. Film director John Ford gets thundering rhythms that call to mind the stampedes of his Wild West movies. Olympian Joan Benoit Samuelson has a section with the steady tempo that befits a long-distance runner.

And then there’s a piece celebrating Burke, who never made a movie or won a medal. But the music dedicated to her, as described by Cape music teacher Tom Lizotte, sums up Burke’s personality, and her importance to the town, as well as anything. It is, he said at the time, “warm and inviting.”