By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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POPLAR GROVE — Over the course of 25 years delivering the mail to an expansive swath of rural Boone County, Cheryl Barlow has turned her postal customers into an extended family of sorts.
She checks on elderly customers when they haven’t emptied their mailbox. She greets farmers and rural residents with friendly hellos, covers small extra postage costs when needed, and she’s even knit a shall for a woman on her route.
Barlow, now 67, is contemplating retirement, which she said she could do by the end of the year. That would spell the end of a nearly six-decade era in Boone County. Barlow inherited the rural post route from her father, former Poplar Grove Village President Roger Day, and for 58 years the father-daughter duo has been a constant that connects rural residents through the mail.
“They’ve been an institution for our community and just greatly appreciated for everything they did,” said Barb Hall, co-owner of Edwards Apple Orchard, which is on Barlow’s route. She’s “been around so long, I always thought she felt like part of the family.”
“She is a friend, not just a postmaster but a friend.”
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Barlow, and Day before her, serve more than 400 homes on the 98-mile route, which is driven from roughly Beaverton Crossroads to the state line after mail is sorted in Belvidere.
As a child, Barlow said she would often ride along with her dad on delivery. He even taught her to drive on the route, she said. Even now, 25 years after taking over the route in 1997, she still refers to it as “my dad’s route.”
“Until he’s gone it will be my dad’s route,” she said.
Many of the people she delivers to feel the same.
“Everybody on my route asks, ‘How’s Roger? How’s your dad?,” she said. “They love dad.”
Day started delivering on the route in 1964, often one of two jobs he worked. People in Boone County knew him well from delivering the route, but he’s perhaps best known for his service to the village of Poplar Grove, where he was a long time board member before serving as village president for 18 years ending in May 2009.
“Everybody knew and appreciated the Day family,” Barb Hall said. “Just having the continuity it’s been wonderful.”
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Day took an old-school approach as the village leader, helping out with anything that may need fixing across Poplar Grove.
“He would lay in the road for Poplar Grove,” Barlow said. “He grew up there and his mother was born in the house that he lived in.”
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Barlow was 5 when Day married her mother, and she was raised in Poplar Grove until moving to Rockford about 48 years ago. She still lives in Rockford with her husband, Jeff, a retired plumber. They have three adult daughters.
Barlow worked a route in Candlewick Lake for four years before taking over her dad’s route. She said one thing she won’t miss when she retires is dealing with the winter weather.
“In 30 years, I would say there’s maybe five days I didn’t deliver the mail,” Barlow said. “On my route, if it’s blowing and drifting, you’re not getting through. … One day I couldn’t get any further, the plows weren’t even out.”
But she’s handled the winters well, even when snow banks pile multiple feet high and engulf mailboxes on her route, Ken Hall of Edwards Apple Orchard said.
“Bless her heart, I’ve never had to pull her out of the ditch,” he said.
It’s the extra touches that Barlow and Day put into the job that made them community staples, the Halls said. Like when Barlow checked in on Hall’s mother after her mail wasn’t picked up and then reported back to the couple when she learned everything was OK.
“I told her,” Barb Hall said. “That’s why we love you.”
This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on Twitter at @KevinMHaas.