Newspaper Article 2022 – Driver Adam calls it a day

Driver Adam calls it a day

Lots of changes over 25 years on rural delivery

Leanne Warr

Rural delivery driver Adam Appleton recalls being out on a run one day when he came across a local holding a carrot.

Curious, he wanted to know what that was all about.

“He’s driving down the road with a carrot, no dogs, he gets to the gate where the bulls are and he calls.

“I go up and say ‘what the hell are you doing’?”

The next thing he knew, a donkey came running up to the man.

“The man said ‘the bulls’. ”

Adam observed as the donkey went back and chased all the bulls back up to the gate.

Once the gate was open the man led them down the road with the carrot still in his hand and opened the gate to the next paddock.

“[He] and the donkey count the bulls in, the donkey gets the carrot.”

Adam says he called the man a “crafty sod”, to which he replied “there wouldn’t be one fight among the bulls because the donkey wouldn’t let them”.

It was just one of the many funny incidents the now-retired Dannevirke man came across in his 25 years of doing Rural Delivery.

In another incident, there was a tin letterbox where there was a chunk out of the door, Adam says.

“Every so often if you got your finger not quite right it would cut you. I’d moaned about it two or three times and his wife had moaned to him.”

So the farmer was told he had to pick up the mail.

“It wouldn’t have been a week later and I see this mangled letterbox.”

The farmer had placed a bucket beside the letterbox with a note saying to put the mail in the bucket and a new letterbox would be put up soon.

Adam ran into the man’s wife a few days later and asked her what had happened – her husband had cut his finger and had taken a bat to the letterbox.

Adam has seen a lot of changes over the years he’s been doing rural delivery.

“I was never just a mailman,” he says. “I’ve been a freight service as well.”

He’s seen three generations on properties.

“I’ve seen grandparents, the parents and now the kids coming on. Some of them are going back to the farms, some of them aren’t. Some of them have gone on to different careers altogether.”

Post has also completely changed.

Once it was all mail, with only a few packages. Now it’s all packages with only a little bit of mail. Even the junk mail has cut back a lot, with much of it published online.

The Appleton family is well-known in Dannevirke. Adam’s grandfather was Sir William Appleton, once the mayor of Wellington.

Back in the 1930s, Sir William bought shares in the Dannevirke Evening News.

At first, his eldest son Alister was sent to run the newspaper once he returned from service in World War II, but he gave it up to move to Auckland.

There he would start a printing company which would go on to print magazines like the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.

So Lloyd (Happy) Appleton was sent to run the paper.

The family owned the paper until 1986 when majority shares were bought by New Zealand News.

Adam can recall a number of well-known people coming to visit his parents, including former prime minister Sir Keith Holyoake.

“As a kid, if I came home and could smell Mum cooking steak and kidney pie I knew we had the prime minister for tea.”

While Adam spent much of his childhood around the newspaper business, running one wasn’t his cup of tea.

But it looked like he found his niche in rural delivery.

“I enjoyed my time. The last 25 years have just disappeared.”

Adam is looking forward to playing farmer on his 30-acre property where he has 23 head of cattle.

He also plans to continue helping out with the Dannevirke Theatre Company.

Photo captions –

Lloyd (Happy) Appleton ran the Dannevirke Evening News from the 1950s until his health became an issue.
Photo/Dannevirke Evening News

Adam Appleton is looking forward to playing farmer now that he’s retired.
Photo / Leanne Warr