Bruce Howard, a familiar face around the Montauk Post Office for 38 years, retired last month, fully intending to move on March 31 to a little cottage in a medieval walled town called Guerande, on a sea-salt farm in Brittany, France, where he plans to keep bees and make honey.
Covid-19, however, delayed those plans, as it has so many other people’s, and now he’ll probably stay in the hamlet for the summer. He’s worked weekends at the Lighthouse for the last 12 years, and if it reopens he’ll be there again.
Mr. Howard, a fair-haired man with a pleasant, open face, is a Conklin on his father’s side, a descendant of an old East End family. In a roundabout way, that’s what brought him to Montauk in the first place.
Growing up in Amityville in a big family, he was a lifeguard, clammer, and bartender who went surfing at Gilgo Beach every day he wasn’t at work. He attended college at the State University at Brockport, and might have followed his father into local politics had it not been for a close friend whose mother, born in France, had spoken French to the two boys from the time they were babies. The bookish Mr. Howard, no slouch as a scholar, was fluent in the language and “knew I could get into the Sorbonne.”
With a double major in biology and Russian and an apartment in Paris, he spent two and a half years in France before returning to the States, this time to Berkeley in California, a university with a worldwide reputation for political activism. Perhaps somewhat aimlessly, he was pursuing a degree in microbiology and bartending to keep food on the table until, in 1975, his whole life changed.
“Some street evangelist came into the bar I was working in and told me I needed Jesus. I thought he was some Holy Roller freak trying to ‘witness’ to me, get me saved. He came back days on end, not to hang out or drink but to talk to me about Jesus.”
Mr. Howard accompanied the man, a former Lutheran minister who had become an evangelical Christian, to church several times. “I eventually quit bartending, dropped out of Berkeley, and moved back to Amityville.” He was “still growing” in his new faith, he recalled, “but was just drinking the milk, not eating the meat of the Word of the Lord, as they say.”
The minister and his wife came to visit a year or so later. They stayed in the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan, “where I got baptized in the bathtub of their hotel room.”
The Conklin connection brought Mr. Howard out east not long after. The family owned land here and there on the South Fork, and in the early 1980s his father gave him a house he’d built on Napeague. Mr. Howard turned it into a bed-and-breakfast, which he called East Gate. (According to evangelical and Jewish tradition, the Messiah will come through the eastern gate of the temple compound in Jerusalem.)
Mr. Howard moved to Montauk in 1991, becoming a member of the Living Water Full Gospel Church in Wainscott, now called Hamptons Church. He’s worked under no fewer than 38 postmasters as a postal clerk and mailman. An animal-lover, he offered to sit for people’s dogs at no charge two years after he arrived, earning the hearts of staff and residents.
He’s always had a mischievous side, which seems to have gotten bigger as he grew older. At the post office, he and his co-workers used to “turn off the alarm and stuff every box with chocolate on Valentine’s Day and Halloween,” he remembered, chuckling. He’d get people’s mail from their boxes when he wasn’t supposed to, he’d let their dogs into the lobby. “I wasn’t a good rule-follower.”
And more? “Marilyn Behan used to say, ‘You’ve slept in every bed in Montauk. Whose bed are you sleeping in now, Goldilocks’s?’"
