Childhood Career Choices - Part I Paperboy!
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Eleven is a hard age. A little more than a kid but not an adolescent I was caught at that in between place. When I was 11 years old I was old enough to need some spending money but not old enough to babysit. Your Uncle Dave had a paper route and Aunt Beth and Aunt Ann were babysitting. So what was I to do? I had to be 15 before I could work at McDonalds, mowing lawns and walking dogs was way too much work, I was too young to get social security and too old to get a weekly allowance. Plus I was kind of lazy. My parents were very big on us kids earning our way and in the process learning about self discipline and money management.
Luckily Dave’s paper route had grown and was becoming too much for him to complete before school so we negotiated and I joined him as his first employee. He had a lousy benefit package but the work was consistent. At the time he was up to 80 papers that needed to be delivered every morning except Sunday.
Our day started at the crack of dawn. 6 a.m. What the hell?? Who gets up at 6 a.m.? Evidently paper boys do - like dairy farmers there’s no escaping the daily duties so while my friends and classmates were still sleeping I would reluctantly rise from my nice warm bed and throw a scarf over my plastic pink curlers. Not even a paper route was going to keep me from my beauty regimen. Dave and I would drag the big stacks of papers in from our front porch and down to the little foyer area right inside our back door where we rolled the Sun Times and folded the Tribune to be able to tell them apart on our route.
We each had a large crossbody bag that we carried over our shoulders while we rode our bikes. There was also a wire basket on either side of the back wheel of our bikes that held papers. If we were lucky, which we were on most days besides Thursdays, we could fit all of the papers for our part of the paper route in the baskets and bag and finish our route in one trip. Thursdays were our least favorite days because they had all of the weekend ads in them so were really thick. They were difficult to roll and fold and we always had to make two trips on Thursdays because of their size.
As I peddled down the sidewalks, I would reach into my shoulder bag, grab a tightly folded newspaper and deftly throw it to the front porch. The first few days at the job my papers would flip open in the air and fall apart or not make it to the porch at all. There’s definitely an art to the throw, a certain flick of the wrist and I gradually became a pro. I preferred throwing the Sun Times since they were shaped like a tube they would twirl through the air and nearly always make it to the spot I was aiming for.
Now, this was in the Chicago area so we had a lot of weather. We had rain, and snow and wind and cold, heat and humidity. So one of the first things we checked when we got up was the weather. This was before cell phones so in other words we got up and stuck our heads out the front door. For the most part Dave and I did the route in pretty much any kind of weather but some days when it was really raining hard we would give my Mom the best puppy dog eyes we could muster and she would take pity and drive us around. We would throw the papers in the back of the car and as she drove up and down the streets we would jump out and deliver the papers. My Mom would never let us just throw the papers from the car landing on the driveway. She knew what it was like to get a wet newspaper and she was not going to let us do that to our customers.
One day the wind was blowing in hard from the north. As Dave headed out with his papers a gust of wind caught him just right knocking he and his bike over - papers spilled out and popped their rubber bands blowing everywhere. He ran through the yards and down the street scooping up the pages. My Mom took that pile of crumpled papers and while we were out she sorted every last one of them. By the time we got home Supermom had put them back together into six full papers.
The winter days were the most challenging. We were known to ride our bikes in well plowed streets and cold, but if there was fresh snow this presented a problem. We did the best we could but it was slow going as we had to walk. We wore our boots, scarves, hats, coats and snow pants to stay warm enough for the entire trip. On some days we would have to come in just to warm up before we finished. When it was especially cold - and I’m talking boogers freezing in your nose cold - my Mom would once again take pity. In 1967 Chicago had one of the biggest snowstorms on record. Twenty three inches fell in just over 24 hours. It is the only time I can remember the newspapers not being delivered to our front stoop.
The weather wasn’t the only challenge of the paper route. One morning as I got off my bike to run a few papers up to the houses a large german shepherd came straight at me full speed with his teeth bared. I grabbed a rolled up Sun Times and raised it above my head ready to hit him before he tore me apart. Right before he reached me his owner stuck his head out the door and yelled for him. He stopped abruptly and tail between his legs ran back to the house but I stood there rooted in my spot, my arm still raised with the Sun Times tight in my fist. Once I could finally move I looked down to make sure I hadn’t peed in my pants. After that incident I lived in terror of running into an unleashed dog.
Since we had to be out on the route by 630 in order to have enough time to get ready for school it was still dark out in the winter months. From the time Richard Speck killed eight nursing students not far from our home in 1966 I was terrified of the dark. For that reason I hated the winter months of the paper route. I would put off leaving for as long as possible and I would ride down the middle of the street so as not to be near any bushes where I knew the bad guys would be hiding. My Mom told me to sing and that would distract me so that is what I did. Pink curlers in my hair, riding down the middle of the street, I sang my little heart out until I was safely back home, fear rooted in my chest, my toes frozen, and already dreading the next morning of the paper route.
Every Saturday a small brown envelope would be included with the papers that contained $20 for the week of work. Dave and I would split it down the middle and then put half of that in the bank but we were allowed to spend the other half. So by the end of the month I would have $20 to spend for all my hard work. Our paper route money provided us with candy, the occasional movie and maybe a dairy queen cone. I felt we did important work because at that time all perceptions of the world around us were delivered via the paper route. Dave and I came away with mostly fond memories and the lessons we learned through our paper route - customer service, self discipline, responsibility, cooperation, money management, avoiding rabid dogs and the lost art of tossing a newspaper with precision.