WATERVILLE -- Everyone knows a few heroes -- astronauts, ball players, peacemakers, inventors -- but few are within reach on a nearly daily basis.

Unless letter carrier Royce Rossignol delivers your mail in Waterville.

Rossignol, a Winslow resident who's been delivering letters for 19 years across the river in the Elm City, does more than he's paid for as a carrier.

Time and again, he does what he has called himself to do, and for that he's a hero.

He doesn't make much of it.

"I'm a people person," he said Wednesday. "Anytime I can do something to help people, I'm going to."

He did last Sept. 10, when he was walking his Cherry Hill Drive route, delivering mail.

On that day, a scream broke his stride; Rossignol dashed around a backyard and found a young man swinging from a rope tied to a tree limb. An elderly man, a neighbor, was holding up the young man by his legs, preventing the man from killing himself, but the older man was quaking, struggling, losing his grip. A distraught woman watching it all screamed again.

In seconds, Rossignol recalled, he flipped open his cell phone and called 911, then relieved the older man, grabbing the hanging man and hoisting him up to relieve the asphyxiating pressure the man's weight was causing.

Within 30 seconds, Waterville Police arrived. The skin on the hanging man was turning black, Rossignol said. The officer cut down the man and he and Rossignol did chest compressions on the would-be suicide.

The man who tried to kill himself lived.

"I learned some of that (chest work) in Cub Scouts," Rossignol recalled, "and I remembering saying to the officer, 'Holy cow, this stuff works, but I maybe used some expletives instead of Holy cow'."

For that effort and other good work on his routes, Rossignol was honored by the U.S. Postal Service on Friday at a "Heroes and Leaders" luncheon in Portland.

In a letter of praise to the Waterville postmaster, Charles J. Rumsey IV, Waterville's deputy police chief, wrote of Rossignol, "Your letter carrier certainly meets the definition of a good citizen, and embodies all that we could want in a member of our community."

Rossignol's community of customers and friends have been several times lucky.

Or as Tom Rizzo, the Postal Service's spokesman in Portland, said, "This guy has got this incredible instinct or knack for being in the right place at the right time."

While working his route in 2005, Rossignol found a burning home on Violette Avenue. He smashed a window and yelled through it, fearing the home's elderly female occupant was at home and unconscious.

"You gotta realize some of us carriers -- we're the only people some people come in contact with, especially elderly. We care about 'em."

The resident was safe elsewhere, and Rossignol was lauded for his instincts.

"I got some singed lungs out of that," he said.

And there's more.

Two years earlier, he and some friends -- Chuck Fabian of Fairfield, Danny Veilleux of Oakland and Winslow resident Dick Morin -- were hunting when Rossignol again found himself at the right place when needed.

A branch snapped. That's what Morin remembers from being in a tree stand that day. "I fell 30 feet and broke my back," paralyzing him from the chest down, he said.

Morin's hunting buddies played key roles in his rescue, but Rossignol "got to me first," Morin recalled. "He was a life saver," Morin said of Rossignol. "My yellow lab, Riley, helped, too."

Morin said he woke up, after the fall, "with my dog by my face, whining, 'cause he like didn't know what to do. I knew I broke my back right then and there, severing my spine. So, my dog bolts out of the woods when we hear Royce driving along in his ATV. When he saw Riley coming out, Royce called to him, but the dog looked back toward me. Royce followed the dog in" and was led to Morin.

Rossignol draped his coat on Morin and retrieved Fabian and Veilleux. They called in rescue workers who drove Morin out of there on a flatbed.

"Royce is always willing to help," Fabian said. "When he's in those positions, he just reacts."

"You do what you have to do," said Rossignol, who changed the topic to talk about those delivery routes.

"As letter carriers," he said, "we look out for our customers. People think we just deliver the mail, but we see things. If we see mail building up, we notify police, in case something happened" at a residence.

Waterville postmaster Gene Paradis describes Rossignol as "a proud individual who cares about people. When it comes to helping out people, he thinks of them first and doesn't look at what it's going to take to help them."

Through snow, sleet and dark of night, Rossignol delivers mail in Waterville. Residents along his routes might be very glad of it.

George Myers Jr. -- 861-9249

gmyers@centralmaine.com