'Hometown Hero' Award Given To Bayside Mailman Beloved By Seniors

QUEENS, NY — Claude Boniello has walked the streets of Bayside and Oakland Gardens, delivering mail and stopping to chat with residents along the way, for several decades — a consistency that neighbors appreciate, and have come to depend on.

"He has shown himself to be an asset to the community," Denise Puleri, a friend and customer of Boniello, told the New York Daily News, which awarded the "Hometown Hero" honor.

Boniello is particularly beloved among northeast Queens' seniors, many of whom he stops to chat with along his route, and helps with special mail requests (like forwarding letters to Florida in the winter), the Daily News reported.

Before the pandemic he would stop at a Bell Boulevard Dunkin' Donuts every day to talk with retirees.

"I used to sit there and talk to everybody," he told the outlet. "They used to greet me. ‘Oh, here comes the mailman.’ And it was a half-hour conversation about everything. That was a big thing."

Boniello's trips to Dunkin' Donuts stopped during the early days of the pandemic, but he didn't forgo his mail delivery.

"A lot of people at the time when [the pandemic] first started, they were in their houses and when they saw the mailman that possibly just sort of put a spark to them," he told the Daily News, noting that his long-held job became even more important at that point.

Boniello joined the Postal Service in 1984, following in the steps of his father who also had a civil service job at the Department of Sanitation.

Though he was born in Brooklyn, the longtime mailman was mostly raised in Bayside, graduating from Benjamin Cardozo High School and going on to study nearby at Queensborough Community College.

Read the full New York Daily News piece, where Boniello is heralded as a "hometown hero" here.