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Teamsters In The News .                 Detroit's Marty Peters makes 60 years of UPS service. .

When Marty Peters pulls on his brown uniform in the pre-dawn hours on March 7 and reports for his regular 3:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. shift at UPS he'll pass a service milestone exceeded only by the company's founder -- 60 years of non-stop service.

Even at a company where drivers average 17 years on the job - four times longer than the typical American worker - the 83-year-old Peters is the longest-tenured of UPS's 407,200 global employees.

And Peters is far from slowing down. The Macomb Township resident currently works full-time, beginning his day at 3:30 a.m. "shifting" trailers for the early morning operation. He splits his time between the cab of a heavy truck moving trailers among the loading docks at a UPS center in Detroit and then moving inside as a clerk to help packages with incorrect addresses find their way to recipients.

"On behalf of all of UPS's employees across the world, I'd like to thank Marty Peters for delivering six decades of dedicated service to UPS and its customers," said Mike Eskew, UPS's chairman and CEO. "And I'd like to congratulate him as he celebrates this remarkable anniversary."

Only two people in UPS history worked 60 years or longer. Jim Casey, the man who founded UPS at the age of 19 in 1907, worked until his death in 1985 and Paul Oberkotter, the company's third CEO, worked 60 years before stepping down.

Peters was fresh out of the Army when he began working for UPS on March 7, 1946. He started out making about 95-cents an hour and appreciated the fact that unlike the delivery company for which he worked before the war, UPS provided his uniform, including a brown bowtie.

"You couldn't get out the door unless you had a bowtie on," Peters recalled with a chuckle. "That was a big priority at UPS, shine your shoes and a bowtie."

In the 1940s, he drove a four-cylinder, air-cooled White Horse delivery truck with no heater or defroster. Sometimes he'd buy a kerosene lantern to generate a little heat against the frigid Michigan winters. But since the truck also had no turn signals, the heat would quickly dissipate when Peters rolled down the window to signal a turn.

Since then he's held a variety of jobs from sorting packages and loading trucks to driving a tractor trailer on a regular route between Detroit and Grand Rapids and running the local customer counter.

"I'd say I've had just about every job UPS has got," he said. "And it keeps you moving, I tell you. There's no easy job at UPS."

Peters has seen big changes in the way UPS drivers do their job. And the biggest have been driven by rapidly advancing technology like the small handheld computers - known as Delivery Information Acquisition Device or DIAD -- that replaced the pen and paper drivers used to carry to record pickups and deliveries.

And he's seen big changes in the city of Detroit. When he started, UPS delivered about 1,200 packages a day in the state of Michigan. At the height of the company's holiday rush last December, UPS delivered about 2 million packages in a single week in the Detroit area alone.

As for now, he says he's not thinking of retirement. And he's also not thinking of wearing the brown shorts for which many UPS drivers are known.

"My wife says my legs are for her eyes only," Peters said.