New Top Postman Aims to Prove He Can Deliver

WASHINGTON —  Anthony M. Frank, taking remedial training to be postmaster general, spent a day as a letter carrier. While sorting the mail, he grabbed Fortune magazine and riffled through to look for a picture of himself and his dog.

“What are you doing?” a Tiburon, Calif., letter carrier asked her future No. 1 boss.

“I’m looking for my picture,” Frank said.

“No, you’re not,” she said. “You’re reading the mail.”

“She was very good,” Frank said. “There are rules, and you stick by them.”

Frank, the nation’s 69th postmaster general, is a successful businessman who is being introduced simultaneously to the rules of Washington and the world’s largest quasi-business--the U.S. Postal Service.

Frank’s movement from the corporate board room to L’Enfant Plaza (where the postal service is headquartered) is the latest chapter in the American experiment with citizen government. Successful business executives and lawyers frequently are parachuted into high-level jobs in Washington. Some, like Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III, perform well enough to get succeedingly important jobs. Others limp quietly home after a few months of frustration.

Financial Giant

Frank is former chairman and chief executive officer of the First Nationwide Financial Corp., which he built from a small San Francisco company to the nation’s sixth-largest savings bank. In a troubled industry, his corporation made money each of his 17 years as chairman, growing from assets of $400 million to $19 billion.

“Frank is the best-known figure in the savings and loan industry,” said Wallace F. Smith, a professor of business administration at UC Berkeley. “He was so influential, so important, when he took the job it was hard to believe.

“He is a fairly tough person to work for,” Smith said, “but effective and very, very intelligent.”

Frank has promised to remain on the job three years--a dramatic change for an organization that has gone through five postmasters general in four years.

In his first two months here, Frank has moved sure-footedly through a maze of public relations traps but has not made major changes at postal headquarters.

“He’s not an autocrat,” said a postal employee who has watched Frank since he took over March 1. “It goes back to his roots as an immigrant. He’s considerate. That doesn’t mean he’s not going to change things, but he doesn’t do it initially.”

Frank has shown himself to be a master of the inspired gesture: Ignoring the advice of many of his postal colleagues, he accepted an invitation to a symposium on privatizing the Postal Service sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute.

There, he delivered a message right over the heads of his startled audience to the union members picketing outside in the rain. “Is privatization simply a code word for union busting? Is privatization an attempt to let private companies selectively skim off the profitable segments of postal business?” In either case, he said, “I am against it.”

“The fallout, on balance, has been pretty good,” Frank said in an interview. “The employees now know where the new guy stands.”

Met With Board

After the event, Moe Biller, president of the American Postal Workers Union, described Frank as a “nice man. He’s certainly against privatization.”

In another symbolic step, Frank recently got the Postal Board of Governors together with union leaders for the first time in recent history. Employee costs make up 83% of the postal budget, and Frank has had little experience with unions.

And in his first big meeting with the postal hierarchy, he said he wasn’t satisfied with having a predominately white male network running a service that is 21.4% black and 31.2% female.

But Frank’s management skills will be tested to the limit in the isolation of the “pink palace” postal headquarters.

His California savings bank had 5,000 employees; the postal service has 800,000. His S&L; had 381 branches; there are 40,000 post offices. His S&L; had $19 billion in assets; the Postal Service spends $38 billion every year.

As bank chief, he answered to Ford Motor Co., which bought First Nationwide in 1985.

As head of the Postal Service, he reports to a presidentially appointed Board of Governors, seeks rate increases from the independent Postal Rate Commission, negotiates with four major unions, is lobbied by dozens of organized mail users, is overseen by the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, is subject to congressional budget cuts, and runs a service with which every American has personal experience.

Frank said: “I was surprised--I suppose this doesn’t say much for me--at the complexity: collecting 500 million pieces of mail from 400,000 locations six days a week, sorting and transporting them to 100 million delivery points with no permanent loss of mail.”

“Tony” Frank was born in Germany in 1931, the son of economists who fled Nazi Germany in 1937. His father landed a job as a runner on Wall Street for $12 a week. His mother got a job teaching at Bryn Mawr College.

Grew Up in West

Frank grew up in Hollywood, Calif., where his father was a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch. He attended Dartmouth College, then lived with his wife, Gay, in a Volkswagen minibus while doing postgraduate work in Vienna. Frank still drives the 1955 minibus, claimed to be the oldest working minibus in the country.

A registered Democrat who raised money for Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and went to the 1968 convention in Chicago as a Robert F. Kennedy delegate, Frank became friendly with Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) several years ago and recently was chairman of a fund-raising dinner in San Francisco for Dole’s presidential campaign.

Ned Eichler, a longtime San Francisco acquaintance, investment banker and author of a book on the savings and loan industry, said that among business executives, Frank was unusually oriented to public policy.

“The courtesy this country gave to my family and myself when we arrived from Nazi Germany in 1937 is not forgotten and I would like to return some of that,” Frank said when he was named postmaster general.

But Eichler said he read of Frank taking the postmaster general’s job with “mild sadness--it’s a place where he is going to have a hell of a time, no matter how good he is, making dramatic changes.”

His greatest strength, Eichler said, is an “acute sense of the strategic opportunity.”

Does It Exist?

The question is whether there exists a strategic opportunity at the Postal Service.

Postal employment has skyrocketed; the pace toward automation has been slow. Rates have been going up on roughly a 3-year cycle.

Last year, desperate to reduce the deficit, Congress socked the Postal Service with a $1.245-billion, 2-year bill for postal retiree health insurance and cost-of-living adjustments.

As a result, the Postal Service canceled 75% of its fiscal 1987 capital projects--new buildings, for example--and closed a half-day every week.

Asked whether the Postal Service really needed to close window hours 10% of the week to save 0.6% of operating costs, Frank said: “I just don’t know.”

The decision was made before Frank took office, and he said it was done after “an awful lot of consultation and some severe cutting here at headquarters in new programs.”

Frank said he is making every effort to “see if we can restore window hours,” but added, “We have to do it with real dollars, and the real push comes next year when we have to save $270 million versus $160 million this year.”