Vashon Post Office will lose a familiar, funny and performative (in the best possible sense of the word) presence when postal clerk Bob Venezia retires at the end of this week and sails away from his working life on Vashon to find new adventures.
Bob, who has worked at the post office since 2016, has earned accolades from customers and co-workers for his unflappable and helpful presence “on the window” over the years — a time span that has included the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as last year’s severe staffing shortage that caused a catastrophic crush of packages to pile up at the post office.
“He is the loveliest person,” said mail carrier Linda Martinez, describing how she had never seen her co-worker lose his temper, even when confronted by angry and frustrated customers last winter. “He has a calm equilibrium.”
But during the staffing shortage, even Bob — who branded himself as the post office’s “package hound” and cockily boasted of his ability to sniff out misplaced parcels in the nooks and crannies of the office — was daunted.
“I worked a ridiculous number of hours,” he said, recalling the mental and physical rigors of those dead-of-winter days and nights.
But through it all, in good times and bad, Bob has persevered — helping customers buy stamps, mail packages, and pick up their mail.
You have to wonder — what has made this now white-haired, unflappable presence tick for all these years?
When Bob, who is 71, learned that I’d write this tribute about him, he provided a bio blurb, perhaps to help me nail down the facts, or no, more likely, to heighten some of the mystery behind his charm.
“Bob hails from somewhere in the mysterious east (possibly Long Island),” the bio reads. “He landed in San Francisco around 1979, hoping to turn his seemingly supernatural powers into quick cash. Magic has long been a factor in Bob’s life, either by studying and performing it, or through the magic of 3D photography and cinema. Bob lives now in West Seattle with his very smart wife, the impressive Mandy Lee.”
Okay. So, as many of us suspected all along, Bob is an artist.
And as it turns out, he’s an acclaimed one, at that.
In his younger years, Bob worked in San Francisco as a performer of New Vaudeville — a movement of loosely associated acts that draws on traditions of vaudeville and street carnivals. That line of work brought him to Seattle in the early 1990s.
He wound up staying, performing in venues including Seattle’s acclaimed Moisture Festival many times over the years.
But starting in the mid-90s, Bob also delved into another delightfully niche art form — stereoscopic photography — a precursor to virtual reality that many people of a certain age recall experiencing via a popular plastic toy called the Viewmaster.
That was child’s play for Bob too, but as an adult, his 3D photography was, and still is, the real deal: startling crisp and color-saturated photography of two different images, creating remarkable three-dimensional depth when viewed through a slide display.
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, he became a number-one ranked exhibitor worldwide of digital stereoscopic photography, according to the Photographic Society of America (PSA). He had hundreds of acceptances in PSA-recognized exhibitions and won numerous awards, including at least a dozen gold medals.
He also shot a short film in 3D, “Animated Amusements,” that won the Artistic Achievement Award at the 2011 convention of the National Stereoscopic Association and played (in a 2D version) at the 2011 Seattle International Film Festival.
His work from that time still stuns — a long exposure of the Brooklyn Bridge that won a first-place prize for Stereo Photo of the Year in a 2009 competition, and his image of gondolas at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas that was named Stereo Photo of the year for 2010.
I know this because I’ve seen the photos — Bob showed them to me in the break room of the Vashon Post Office, just last week.
So how did this guy wind up behind the counter of the Vashon Post Office?
That’s easy. Like a lot of other artists, he needed a day job. All along the way, he’d had them — becoming a Photoshop expert and eventually working as a Microsoft contractor and vendor.
But in 2016, luckily for all of us, Bob became entranced with the idea of becoming a mail carrier on Vashon.
“I loved the romantic idea of it,” the former filmmaker said, adding, in a deadpan twist, “I thought I’d be so good at it that people would be copying what I did. But as it turned out, I was the worst carrier they ever had. I was awful, but it was not for lack of trying — every day I would come in with the greatest optimism, and at the end of the day I was just crushed.”
Moving to the customer service counter, though, Bob found his groove.
“Working at the window is the closest thing I can think of to being a street performer,” he said while acknowledging that some of his customers were a tough audience for his on-the-job improv and theatrical shtick.
Still, he was there to help and advise, and most of all, to step up to perform a job.
That’s something artists are well-trained to do, in any situation — to find creative and fulfilling ways to play their roles and live their lives by connecting deeply with other people.
Bon voyage, and happy retirement, Bob — you made Vashon better. Now you can finally get off your feet, stop lifting heavy boxes, and get back to your amazing photography.
— Elizabeth Shepherd, Editor
