In tribute: Former Causey postmistress did it all

CAUSEY — Mary Lee Terral wore many hats in the village of Causey — mother and wife, seamstress, church pianist, volleyballer and bookkeeper. And for over 40 years, she was the postmistress of the small community southeast of Portales.

The latter role she held from 1976 to 2016, assuming the position from her mother-in-law Jennie Dee Terral. Between those two the post office was a generational family operation since 1938, and continues as such with only a slight interruption. That’s about 80 years out of some 110 that the community in Roosevelt County has had its local mail service managed by multitasking women with a shared name.

That succession wasn’t precisely planned, it just worked out that way, the way so many things do, said Terral’s daughter.

“They did what they needed to do,” Shonni Sokora told The News. “Somebody needed to do it, she said I’ll do it and 40 years later...”

Sokora’s cousin Sabra Watson continues that tradition, as it were, stepping up shortly after Terral’s retirement. Terral passed last month at age 82 and was laid to rest Oct. 26 at the Causey Cemetery in a service led by the same Portales preacher, Glenn McCoy, who officiated her daughter’s wedding and her son’s funeral before her.

At its peak, Sokora recalls no more than 103 kids enrolled K-12 in Causey, and that’s only dwindled after the school closed in the early 1970s. Yet even as the population reduced to a fraction, the post office has managed to hang on although with limited hours.

“Some years back, there was a big push by the postal service to close little offices like that. If you have only 15 people that get their mail there, it costs a lot more to run that office than for people to buy their stamps,” Sokora said. “But the community kind of rallied around them so the post office didn’t close, which was the cool thing.”

The village’s grocery store and post office shared a building, and in busier times the community might have had another grocery store, too. There were also two active churches — Terral wore a big hairdo and played piano by ear at Causey Baptist — as well as a hardware store, cafe, beauty shop and interestingly enough a croquet court, as Sokora recalls.

“I promise you, I remember that as a little girl,” she said.

Hours at the post office “were a lot longer” before Terral’s retirement, said her husband of 64 years, but the operation has pared back some as the population has decreased and mail services face more competition in the new millenium.

“Well, you know, things have changed a lot out here,” said Jerome Terral. “Now it’s just two hours a day, Saturday is four hours.”

In the weeks since her mother’s passing, Sokora said she was touched to find that her mother had preserved just about every single holiday card she’d received from her family, not to mention other correspondence and thank you notes among “a million sweet little thoughts” accumulated over a lifetime.

“Your heart aches because you just don’t want to put them in a trash can,” she said. “She kept all those things and they mattered to her.”

Nor did it surprise her that her mother — “a sweetheart, larger than life” — had been well-regarded and in turn cherished her community and family.

“Causey’s a little bitty town, and I’m sure there were people that had a lot more than us, and people that had a lot less than us, but everybody was the same. You didn’t think somebody was richer or poorer. We were the same,” she said. “Everybody (from the community) is going to smile and have a Mary Lee memory of some kind, something she said or some kind of thing she did.”