Belated mystery

Listening to these Postal Service training films brings back a memory of a situation that I didn’t question at the time, but seems puzzling now. In 1978 I worked night shift for a quasi-private part of OU in Norman. This “business” ran two facilities on the OU campus.

One was the Conference Center at the south end of campus. I’ve described it here. It was basically an upscale hotel for conferences who wanted an academic connection. We had contracts with the bankers and bar associations. They brought in members for a week and hired OU profs to present seminars along with the usual convention activities. The hotel had a set of cottages, some for married conference participants, a few reserved for semi-permanent Visiting Scholars or Visiting Poet Laureates.

The other was OPTO, Oklahoma Postal Training Operations. It was part of the Postal Service, not part of OU. It rented the lower floors of Walker Tower which also held an OU student dorm in the upper floors. We ran the front desk in the lobby, solely for OPTO, though we had to deal with the noise and distraction of the regular students passing through the lobby and playing PacMan in the game room. We kept a shelf of books and materials for the OPTO students, new PO hires receiving orientation and older employees learning about the latest tech. We handed out the materials to the students when they checked in. I’m sure the students must have watched some of these training films, and the books described some of the machines mentioned in the films.

Why did OPTO want to be on campus instead of renting part of an office building in OKC where it could be close to a major USPS center? Unlike the conferences, its students had no contact with OU faculty. I wasn’t curious about this at the time, but now it seems like a mystery.

Googling OPTO yields a surprise. The Postal Service later expanded OPTO plus the Conference Center into its National Training Center, a giant resort hotel and conference center open to any guest who can pay the price. Specializes in conferences and business travelers. Still in Norman but away from campus.