This is my mailbox. As you can see, it’s bashed on one side, a wedding present from who we think was a bat-wielding redneck driving by our house the night of our wedding five years ago. An act of malice, or just another Saturday night in the country? We’ll never know. What I do know is that Jake tried to fix it by bashing the metal back out from the inside. You can see how successful that was. Guess it’s hard to get a good swing from inside a mailbox.
I have fantasies about owning a new shiny un-crumpled Netflix box one day….maybe a stately castle or an illustritious horse, but I guess that would be like hanging a sign that says, All Bats Welcome.
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In Maine, drive by baseball is a regular occurrence. Folks that have mailboxes on a main road, hang them from metal chains and a metal post set a few feet back from the road. It’s not too far away that the mailman is inconvenienced. Every time that mail box gets whacked it just swings back and forth and only gets a minor dent in it.
I’m from PA and my sister lives in Maine and I thought that the hanging mailboxes from chains was a way to make them a bit flexible for the snow plows. Hmmmm, good idea though for the Saturday night hoodlums!
Oh no no. Juvenile punks whose parents don’t know where their kids are past curfew!
Option 1: using bricks or stones encase your next mailbox.
Option 2: fill one with cement for a little surprise to the next delinquents.
Just be careful – filling or surrounding a mailbox with concrete is illegal in a lot of areas.
Trust me: you don’t want to buy a beautiful new mail box. When we moved to this semi rural area, there was an old, but serviceable, standard size mailbox. We put our name on it and made do. A few years later, we upgraded to the mailbox I’d always wanted. The largest rural type mail box made–big enough for all the books and magazines we order, and many other small packages, too. We paid a man to install it according to postal requirements.
A few weeks later we got up one morning and discovered that mail box vandals had been through the neighborhood. They had damaged a lot of boxes, but had been so impressed with the target our spectacular new one made that they had destroyed it to the point that it looked like a gigantic modern art sculpture. The box was completely beaten apart and knocked upright at an angle rising up sideways from the post. People slowed down to look when they drove past. Families walked down the road to have a look. It was a neighborhood attraction. We saw the boys who did it, but couldn’t prove it. We were sitting on the porch and saw them come down the street three times to look at their handiwork. In a pickup not from the neighborhood. We got in the truck and followed them to see where they lived, but they took off too fast to follow safely. When we described the truck to the police, they said the owner was a punk they knew well.
No way are we going through the expense over and over. For the first time in our lives, we rented a post office box and have kept it ever since. With so much identity theft now, it is good to know that no matter where we are when the mail runs, our mail is safely locked up. I used to think post office boxes were just for transients. Now I know better.
Since your office is in town, you might consider the same course. These days when you change addresses, there is a number you call that takes down the names of all the publications you subscribe to and notifies them for you. Doing a change of address seems to keep the free address labels coming from various organizations forever.
Wow Paula that is quite a story!
Jessie….I like the history of yours, plus I don’t want you to get your new stately one bashed or destroyed like Paula did and I can just see you popping June in to the car seat and following the bastard that did it
Stoopid rednecks. I know a man that tried that when he was a kid, only they did it by sitting in the passenger window, twisting around and chopping at the mailboxes with an axe while a buddy drove. Long story short. Drove by, swung axe, missed box, cut a big gash in Dads car, oops. Anyway, he went on to become a respected business man and preacher. Guess no one is hopeless
I guess Belgium is still a pretty safe place for mailboxes! We have lots of wood or stone boxes, but I’ve always loved the metallic american ones! I think your crushed mailbox still has a funny charm about it…
What with Halloween coming up you need to watch out for people throwing pumpkins at the mailboxes! Kids would go around to yards, steal jack-o-lanterns and then throw them at mailboxes. We used to just take the box right off the pole that night.
This kind of vandalism usually happens in rural areas, but a few years ago, a truck full of boys did it in a ritzy neighborhood in the city near here. One of the rascals was standing in the bed of the truck and when he threw a pumpkin at a box, he became overbalanced and fell under the wheels of the moving truck. He died. It was right after the incident out here.
There was a letter to the newspaper warning people to talk to their teens about safety in vehicles. Not one word about talking to them about respecting the property of others and behaving as low abiding citizens.
Jessie, you can sometimes use a small car jack to jack the dents out of mailboxes. It just depends on whether you can find a small enough jack (if you have a compact car, those jacks are sometimes quite small) and whether you can properly position it inside the mailbox. If the jack will fit, it’s much easier than trying to swing a hammed inside the mailbox!
You can also use a jack to fix the end of a crushed driveway culvert.
I tell you what you can do.. get an oversized mail box and a standard box.. Put the standard inside the oversized box and affix it firmly to your mail box post. Then before sinking the post in the ground, fill the gap between the two boxes with concrete… Finally, dig a big hole.. and set your mailbox post with cement. If someone hits your box, that bat will rebound on them hard.. most likely causing damage to person and vehicle. Mailbox will survive.
I know it’s not charming, but when we moved to our place 19 years ago, we had the same thing happen and had to get a new mailbox…and went for the Rubbermaid kind. We got the ugly green one, but nobody has smashed it in 18 years and nobody looking for our house ever misses it when we tell them to look for the green mailbox on the left!
How timely your dented mailbox story! Our rusty bucket of a mailbox became the Saturday night entertainment for someone with nothing better to do. I’ll admit, I also had dreams of a fancy mailbox to replace the rusty one. We are now the proud owners of a plain, but practical mail receptacle!
Most of the new, developer built, houses here have the mailboxes built into a brick pillar, along with a place to put the newspaper. They only have the small regular size mailbox, though, and vandals can still rip the lid off from the hinges. All these brick pillars are something for law abiding citizens to worry about sliding into when it is slick, in places where they otherwise would just bump the curb a little.
When I lived in rural NC my mailbox was smashed so many times I ended up getting a post office box. You are in town nearly every day anyway…
I wouldn’t bother replacing it, but 5 minutes with a can of spray paint could really make it look a lot better. Hot pink! Candy Apple Red! Have some fun!
My old Rubbermaid was too tempting to the hoodlums, I guess. They smashed it to bits on Christmas Eve this year. I still can’t figure out what they used. It was busted from the top and one of the doors flew off into my neighbor’s yard. I never even found all the pieces!
Man, that’s a lot of aggression to take out on a poor, unsuspecting garbage can.