The PMG is unmoved by his critics.

"Everything that we have in the plan I'm convinced has to happen over the course of time to get the Postal Service on firm financial footing and to keep us there," he said.

As for Goldway's concerns: "If somebody wants us to operate like a museum, then fork over the money and we'll be happy to do so."

Promoted from within

Born in the Bronx, Potter attended Cardinal Spellman High School (a year behind Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whom he never knew) and received an economics degree from Fordham University. He followed his father into the Postal Service, assuming that the work would lead him elsewhere.

He went from a part-time graveyard shift in Westchester County, N.Y., to the regional office in Manhattan, where his father, Richard, worked and where Potter met his wife, Maureen. Potter later moved to Washington, where he became postmaster general in June 2001. He had been on the job for four months when the anthrax attacks crisis struck and killed five people, including two D.C. postal workers, thrusting him onto the national stage.

The 71st successor to Benjamin Franklin, Potter is the longest-serving postal boss since the 1820s and only the sixth postal worker promoted from within. He rarely socializes in Washington, preferring to head to his Potomac home after a 10-hour workday. He has a son in college and a daughter who is a high school senior. He'd rather be remembered as the postmaster who saved the mail service than the one who watch it challenged by e-mail.

If things go his way, Saturday deliveries would end next spring, he told customers in Nashville.

"The value of going to four days -- removing a second day -- is even greater," he said. Although no such plans exist, Potter said that Tuesdays are the second-slowest day of the week.

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