PIGEON COVE, N.L. - John Dredge knows how to do the mail.
The 70-year-old native of Pigeon Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula has held the contract to deliver mail to southern Labrador for 53 years and counting.
For the last 30 years he has also delivered mail to the Roddickton-Bide Arm area.
His reliability extended to school busing, a contract he held in areas of the Straits for 41 years.
Dredge started delivering mail for his father in 1966.
He would truck it to communities between L’Anse-au-Clair and West St. Modeste. Later, the road was extended and he was able to drive it as far as Red Bay.
Today, it goes all the way to Charlottetown.
He later took over his father’s business when he passed away in the 1970s and named it Dredge’s Equipment.
Dredge has seen many changes over the years.
Many ferries have passed through since he started crossing with the mail.
Back in the 1960s, he delivered the mail three days a week.
Now it’s six days.
They had to cross the Strait of Belle Isle aboard an open-deck wooden boat, with a capacity to carry seven vehicles.
One boat was called the Cruiser, the other was called the Avalon Voyager.
A crossing back then would typically take about two and a half hours. Today, the ferry crossing is supposed to be one and a half hours.
But it wasn’t always smooth sailing.
There were occasions when it could take up to seven hours in stormier seas.
And then there was the time Dredge’s truck nearly slipped off the edge of the boat.
The rear of the truck just hung on the side of the boat, he says.
But Dredge never panics or worries in these types of situations.
That’s one reason why he’s been able to stay in this business for so long.
He’s worked on his buses in minus 30-degree temperatures with no gloves on,
He’s worked on engines from seven in the evening until three in the morning; he’s dealt with mechanical issues for multiple vehicles simultaneously.
None of it fazed him.
“I never took no notice, I just kept on working,” he told The Northern Pen.
Dredge says one of his favourite parts of the job was, in fact, the mechanical work.
For most of his career, he worked on the vehicles himself.
However, since cars have become more computerized, he’s been unable to do the work, not having any formal mechanical training with computers.
“That put the pressure on me to give up (parts of) the business,” he said.
Now things are winding down a bit.
At the peak of his operations, he owned up to nine buses, two mail trucks, and had snow plows and loaders working for the Department of Highways.
He employed 13 people at that point.
Now, he just runs the mail service with two trucks and two employees.
When his current contract concludes in five years, he’ll be 75 and he figures it will likely be time to give it up by then.
But he’s always enjoyed it.
He says he’s had great drivers over the years and he loved getting to work with his children, who sometimes helped out.
“I liked working,” he said. “The work I was doing, I could do it.”
