David Purkott, Bynum postmaster, said Monday that the Post Office Department had called to tell him of a "temporary delay" on the scheduled closure of his office His office was among 250 fourth class offices ordered closed effective Aug. 2, 1968, as a part of personnel limitations imposed by Congress...
...Friday afternoon the Senate voted to exclude the Post Office Department from the personnel cutback and the department said it would wait another week to give the House of Representatives time to act on it...
...Folks at Bynum aren’t impressed with the contribution they’d be making towards federal fiscal responsibility by sacrificing their postal service. It costs $3,700 a year to maintain the Bynum post office. Revenue from the sale of stamps, money orders and box rentals is a little over $1,200 a year, so the net cost to the government is about $2,500 annually, hardly the cost of a White House state banquet or a barbecue at the LBJ ranch for visiting VIP’s—or the expense of a B52 bomb run from Guam to Vietnam.<
Ira Perkins, principal of the Bynum school 30 years, says, "Closing the post office will kill the town and create more problems than it solves”. He points to the communities of Bole, Agawam, Farmington and Collins that dried up soon after they lost their postal service.
Purkott says he would continue to operate the grocery store for a time, but he doesn’t think he could hang on for more than a year without the income from his salary as postmaster and the trade that is brought in by having the post office in his store Red Wheaton's wife runs the cafe in Bynum "We'd probably have to close down if we lost the grocery store," Red says. The bar would be the next to go—and that would be the end of Bynum.
From the Choteau Acantha