Paul Bass Photo
The postman always rings nice: Maiorano in Front Street Park, which he remembers as the Schiavone scrap yard in his youth.
Carol Manago was thrilled to see Chris Maiorano back in the neighborhood. Even if he didn’t have his mail satchel with him.
Her pooch Chico was less thrilled.
“We love you!” Manago called out to Maiorano Monday afternoon from across sun-drenched waterfront Front Street Park. “Are you going to be delivering today?”
Manago actually knew the answer to the question. The answer was no.
Last Friday Maiorano spent his final day delivering the mail along Route 1311. That’s the southern half of Fair Haven, the neighborhood where Maiorano grew up. He spent 17 years on that mail route until switching this week to East Haven.
The news broke the hearts of regulars like Manago. She and her neighbors ponied up for gift cards, bottles and wines, and cards thanking him for his commitment to his job and the extra efforts he put into ensuring they received their packages, hearing about their lives, and perhaps most of all, delivering a daily smile.
Like other neighbors, Manago had stories to tell about Maiorano’s kindnesses. Like when she had a serious illness preventing her from walking out to the mailbox. Until she felt better Maiorano brought the mail to her door every day and rang the bell.
As she told those stories Monday afternoon, Chico tugged on his leash. Chico lunged at Maiorano. Chico barked at him. Maiorano eluded Chico, took it in stride. He has had practice.
“The people love me. The dogs do not,” he said with a shrug, “It’s the mailman-canine thing,”
Manago called Maiorano’s departure from the beat the end of an era for the neighborhood.
“I’m originally from New York,” she said. “The mailman was your lifeline. Your internet. This person had your back.
“We are so sorry to lose him. There just isn’t that connection anymore with the individual and the mail person, or the mail period. We were assured that whatever we expected, it would get here, or he would find out why it hadn’t.”
Carol Manago with Maiorano (at a safe distance from Chico): “He is one of a kind.”
“Chris has been an integral part of the Fair Haven community, and we are really going to miss him,” reflected Kica Matos, another of the customers with whom Maiorano bonded over the years. “The care and kindness that he exhibited, the interest he took in all of us, the way he showed up —he is one of a kind.”
Maiorano, who is 49, is sad to leave the beat, too. But a stress fracture in his foot has been acting up; he needed a route that requires less walking. About two-thirds of his new route in Short Beach in East Haven, where houses are more spread apart, entails driving. The Fair Haven route has been almost all on foot: From Ferry and Grand he would park in about eight different spots to complete “relays,” or circle from and back to the truck with people’s letters and packages.
The prospect of working outside and seeing lots of people every day lured him to apply to the postal service in the first place. He got the offer in 1998 after taking the test for the second time. The new postal job also paid better, with better benefits, than his then-current job driving a forklift to unload trucks at the Fire Lite factory.
Maioroano knew he had “big shoes to fill” in 2004 when the postal service approved his request to be transferred from Westville to Fair Haven’s Route 1311. The previous carrier, Jimmy Giangrande, was beloved. He worked Route 1311 for 17 years. The spot opened because Jimmy died. People in the neighborhood still remember Jimmy like a late relative.
“I saw the love they had for Jimmy,” Maiorano recalled. “I had something to live up to. I wanted to do my best.”
The new route provided a homecoming of sorts for Maiorano. Maiorano grew up in Fair Haven, on Chatham Street. He attended Fair Haven School. He and his teen buddies hung out in Chatham Square Park. His father and his “Nonnie” (grandmother) still lived in the Chatham Street house. Maiorano and his wife and children now lived in East Haven, closer to Fair Haven than to his then-route in Westville.
Along the route, Maiorano passed the spots on Front Street where he and his pal David Markunas would catch snapper in the Quinnipiac River, then hand them to David’s grandfather to cook up. He figures that three teeth he lost in a teen-aged fight “are on the bridge somewhere.” In between delivering letters, he could catch lunch at his childhood home and play “Italian cards” (a game called “scopa”) with his Nonnie. (She lived until 107.)
Manuel Perez (at right) with Maiorano: “If America was like him, we’d be in a better place.”
And he got to know the people along the route. He made sure to follow up if they had questions about missing packages.
A couple of times a week he would run into David King on Exchange Street after King returned home from work at Modern Apizza. They would always chat, kid each other. On Front Street, he’d count on catching up with Persida Martinez, a retired government worker; when she injured her foot, she texted him to report that she couldn’t make it to the mailbox, so he brought the mail to her door until she recovered.
“I felt taken care of. If you think of them as your family, you want to take care of them and go the extra mile,” Maiorano reflected. “Just being friendly and having a smile —what a difference it can make in a person’s day.”
It made a difference to retired Con Ed worker Manuel Perez. He counted on seeing that smile, the “hey, how you doing?” on Exchange Street for the past 17 years. “He always smiles. Even in the rain and the snow,” Perez said of Maiorano. “If America was like him, we’d be in a better place.”
As e‑mail surged over the past decade, Maiorano found himself delivering more and more packages. Customers began complaining of thefts. Maiorano started placing packages in hidden spots on front porches. At residences without porches, he brought packages to the rear. Marilyn Markunas — related through marriage to Maiorano’s childhood pal David as well as Mairoano’s first girlfriend, Diane — began ordering so many packages that he was regularly ringing the bell, and joking and catching up became part of the routine.
In the summer, he could count on offers of cold water on particularly hot days. On frigid winter days, hot cocoa.
For all the appreciation, there were still the dogs to contend with. They proved more difficult to charm.
One East Pearl Street’s customer’s poodle, for instance, never took to him. “He was a small poodle. He was pretty ferocious. I didn’t want to get near him,” Maiorano recalled. One day the owner told Maiorano the dog was missing. Maiorano found the poodle later in the day in Front Street park. He didn’t get near the dog, but he did return to ring the bell so the owner could retrieve him.
At an Exchange Street home, Maiorano learned to look out for one particularly unfriendly German Shepherd mix. If the dog was outside, Maiorano would bang on the gate, and the owner would come outside to collect the mail. One day in 2007 Maiorano didn’t see or hear the dog. He thought it was safe. He walked up to the door — and the dog leaped out. Maiorano hightailed it to the street. “I had to jump on the roof” of a car until the owner came out. That proved to be his closest canine call.
There were occasional other close calls. One afternoon in 2011 around 3:30 he was “doing the relay” on Poplar Street when he heard “the loudest sound I ever heard in my life.” It sounded like “a quarter stick of dynamite.”
He soon realized he was hearing a series of gunshots. He hit the ground. He saw a driver pass in a Jeep with a gun pointed out of the window. The driver shot up a house three doors from where Maiorano had parked his mail truck.
The Jeep driver left the scene. No one was hurt.
Chris Maiorano: A smile can a difference in people’s lives.
But Maiorano looked up and saw a terrified 6‑year-old girl who had been playing alone in a planter box in the front yard of her home. Maiorano brought her through the front door, consoled her, waited until neighbors showed up to care for her.
“Then it hit me,” he recalled. “I could have been in the crossfire.”
That episode was an outlier. For the overwhelming part, he is leaving behind fond memories from the route. He has not a moment of regret.
He made friends he’ll continue to see. Ines Curbelo and her partner Eric Eskind, for instance.
Curbelo moved onto Front Street during the pandemic. Eskind was out all day at work. Curbelo worked at home. “I was suffocated with loneliness,” she recalled.
One day, when Maiorano arrived with the mail, she told him she was concerned about a package that hadn’t arrived. He said he’d look into it. It arrived the next day. Maiorano rang the bell to deliver it, and a friendship developed. A “biological clock” would ring around 3 p.m. each day, and Curbelo would make a point of going out to chat.
“Dude, I need a painter,” she said one day.
“My brother’s a painter,” Maiorano responded. Brother got the gig.
“Dude, I need a house cleaner,” Curbelo said another day.
“My sister cleans houses,” Maiorano responded. Sister got the gig.
The brother and sister also became social friends with the couple. So did Mairoano and his wife, Lorrie. It turned out that Eskind and Maiorano have the same birthday. So of course the joint party took place on Front Street.
“Chris was the first friend I made here,” Curbelo recalled while eating lunch Monday on the back deck of Streets Smokehouse Boathouse. Maiorano had popped by to say hi. They posed for a photo.
Cinco, Curbelo’s King Charles Spaniel, wiggled into the picture. Cinco was happy, it seemed, to see his postal carrier back in the neighborhood.