Rural Carrier Associate Thomas Kelly was making deliveries last November in Fairfield, IA, when he spotted a customer in trouble.
Connie Singer had parked her truck at the end of her driveway and gotten out to retrieve her mail when she tumbled into a five-foot-deep ditch obscured by a snowdrift.
Later describing her ordeal in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, Singer said she soon grew exhausted and frightened as she struggled unsuccessfully to escape or be seen.
“I finally saw one more vehicle coming, so I grabbed my mail and waved it as far up as I could,” she wrote.
Kelly saw Singer and rushed to her aid, telling her: “Take my hand.”
The Postal Service employee looked “like an angel to me,” the customer wrote.
Kelly pulled Singer to safety, drove her to her house and helped her get inside to warm up and recover.
The customer said the incident gave her a new perspective on letter carriers.
“These men and women do so much more than deliver our mail,” she wrote. “They save lives.”