James Wills has a lot of nicknames.

People who come to the Clinton post office to weigh packages, check for lost mail and buy stamps know him as Jim, Jimmy and Jimbo.

The nicknames extend from Wills, 65, as well. He calls the customers kid, lad, dude and dear, depending on who it is and how well he knows them, which typically is pretty well.

“I know everybody,” he said Monday as he worked at the front desk weighing parcels and greeting customers. “I know everybody’s parents. I know everybody’s grandparents.”

During work, a customer strolled in, saw a reporter and asked, “Is Jimmy going to be on the front page of the newspaper?”

All of that friendly banter and a 34-year cache of memories will wrap up in a final shift Friday, Jan. 30. Wills is retiring from his United States Postal Service career at the end of the month.

Many years ago, Wills was a teacher looking to get his certificate approved when he first moved to Washington. The difficulty of that process forced him to find other employment, which led to a long career working in the Clinton post office.

When he started in November 1980, he remembered being across the highway from the current location on Deer Lake Road, but only briefly before moving into the building near the Clinton park and ride.

A painter on the side, or perhaps a post office clerk on the side and a professional painter, Wills said he stuck with the job because he never went home with work and his art never took off to Thomas Kinkade-level wealth and fame.

“This job, when you’re done, you’re done,” he said.

“And because my painting hasn’t made me millions yet,” he added, cracking a sly smile as he filed mail into post office boxes, many of which he knows almost reflexively.

His memory of people and their lives — their families, their jobs, their homes, their problems — is vast. He asks one woman about her daughter, another about a neighbor, chats up one woman about the little girl with her.

“As I recall, you couldn’t reach the counter,” he said, with the little girl’s eyes and forehead barely peering above the four-foot counter top. “Now you see over it.”

Wills, whose job is to help people get letters and bills and boxes from South Whidbey to all over the world, is himself a well-traveled man. He has visited all but three states.

“When I was a kid, I used to hitchhike a lot …,” he said. “I’ve been to every state except for Kentucky, Rhode Island and Alaska … I have no interest in going to a cold place.”

Being a bit of a traveler makes him well versed in chatting with people about their mail’s delivery address. One person’s package, destined for an area in Seattle, drew Wills’ attention because he recalled getting lost in the neighborhood while coming home from the opera.

In Clinton, which no longer has a coffee house, Wills said the post office is one of the area’s last regular meeting places. He described it as a convergence of disparate people with a common goal of getting their mail or sending it out.

“I feel that post offices are the people’s place,” he said. “It’s where you meet and talk to each other.”

“It’s different from the big city. You know people here,” he added.

On the longevity of his career, and advice for any others seeking to emulate his mainstay in one job for more than three decades, he gave a short response: “Do what you wanna do and get by in life.”

Any well-wishers hoping to bid him farewell into retirement can visit him at the post office on Jan. 30, between the regular hours of 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.