Clementine Kong likes to stay busy. Not just busy doing leisurely things, but busy in a way that challenges her.
“I love to work fast,” Kong said.
So last year, when she was 80 years old, after decades of physically and intellectually demanding work in a number of very different fields, Kong decided try something new, something she had always wondered about. She applied to be a seasonal worker at the U.S. Postal Service during the Christmas rush.
“When I was a little girl, I was raised in Kaimuki just off Waialae with all the tutus around. I always went out to get their mail, and I would wonder, ‘How did that get here?’”
Last Christmas her daughter helped her apply to the USPS, and she was hired to work in the busy Makiki post office under the freeway. She also worked at the Moiliili Post office and at Sand Island. “I enjoy learning new things. I said, ‘I love it. When am I coming back?’”
She came back this Christmas as a seasonal hire, working six days a week, eight hours a day at the Main Post Office near the airport. Kong, now 81, works in the mail processing facility, a building with the square footage of eight football fields which is staffed 24 hours a day. Every piece of mail sent and received in Hawaii goes through this facility, which is a mix of big machines and highly organized people. Kong fits right in.
Kong retired in July after teaching in the Department of Education’s Hawaiian program for 20 years at Heeia School, Kailua Elementary and Kainalu Elementary. For 40 years she cooked Hawaiian food for Auntie Honey’s catering. She and her husband, Richard, owned a backhoe service for many years that they named C&R Enterprise for Clementine and Richard. She got her commercial driver’s license and worked alongside her husband.
“He dug while I hauled,” she said. When she isn’t working, she still likes to drive a backhoe around her Kahaluu property, which she calls “working in my garden.”
A few years back, Kong felt she was going downhill. She had always been active, running and biking for 25-50 miles and lifting weights, but she started to slow down. Three years ago she lost Richard, her husband of 51 years. She also went through a major health scare, but the months of recovery when she was forced to take it easy made her determined to get her strength back.
She takes Zumba exercise classes now. She eats healthy. She had cataract surgery so her eyesight is keen. She can see all those addresses on the mail, even the small print. She started training her brain, timing herself every day doing puzzles from the newspaper. She always tries to improve her time.
Seasonal work at the post office is not easy, and quite a few of the people hired don’t make it past the first week of December.
This week Kong got to work on one of the huge machines that sort mail, which isn’t typical for a seasonal worker, but she learned so quickly. “Curiosity brought me to this job. I just always wanted to know what they do and how they do it,” she said.
Her supervisors and co-workers at the post office adore her, not just because she’s friendly and gracious, but because they admire her work ethic and her ability to master a demanding job.
“I’m a person who wants to get things done,” Kong said. “I love to work fast. In a place like this, I’m as happy as can be.”
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
