I learned how to deal with people, run my own business, pay for my product and collect from people to pay my bills. I was making about $8.00/week (not a misprint) and had more money that any kid my age. I would make a huge payday around Christmas and my customers, with some exceptions, loved me.

In 1969 Hurricane Camille wiped out the town and although we lost our house, the then Daily Herald contacted me to put a route together. They offered to give me the paper free of charge for 30 days to establish a new route. I told them to give me 200 papers a day for six months for free and we had a deal. At 15, I had was already quite the entrepreneur. I worked hard to establish a new route and sold the remaining newspapers at a soup kitchen set up by the U S Army Corps of Engineers to feed the townspeople. It was .10 a copy by then and I was making a lot of money (for the times).

Most of my customers loved seeing me every day. One in particular was an elderly lady who was confined to a wheel chair. Every day, I would ride my bike up her long driveway, over 100 yards and bring her the paper and hand it off to her. She was such a sweet lady and was so appreciative. After Camille, her health worsened and she was moved to a Nursing Home also along my route. She found out and asked me to deliver the paper to her there. This was despite there being a newspaper box on the premises. About three years later, I arrived to deliver the paper and found out that she had passed away. She was over 90 years old. I spoke to the nurse and said, I really liked that old lady. The nurse replied, “Son, she must have liked you too, she’s been blind for over two years!” I didn’t know it at the time. It still chokes me up.

Yes, being a paperboy molded me, and was probably my most important job! It was five years well spent.

The local paper in Los Alamos, NM, still uses paperboys, by the way.

What an experience, what a responsibility to not only distribute a product, collect money and pay bills, but to learn customer service, timeliness, handle disgruntled customers (it happens occasionally) and to find “subs” and train them when you are on vacation – and the planning – to make sure your bill is still on time and all the money is collected – not to mention having to warn the late payers, or actually drop a bad customer.

I agree that this “first job” is formative and nostalgic. Were there times I hated it? Sure! But how many 12 year olds can buy their own pianos and pay for lessons.

It’s a great piece of culture that is slowly fading.

@ tony – did they have the double bag that you stuck your head and neck through? I remember delivering 5-10 papers, turning the bag, deliver 5-10 papers, repeat until the last one is delivered!

They load the kids up here. No-one could carry the weight over their shoulder so instead enormous especially made panniers are used, which can hold a lot of papers.

Rick

“Collecting” was definitely the hard part of the job, sometimes having to go back two or three times to a single house (usually the same ones week after week). I used a Raleigh 26″ single speed, usually with two canvas bags, one over each shoulder, through snow and rain and sleet, up hill both ways! And yes, I attribute my long-standing commitment to transportation cycling to my early years delivering papers.

When I return to visit my parents, I’m always tempted to start reciting names and paper locations: McNeelys, front door; Suschecks, side door; Hansons, front door mail slot, etc…My route ended with one house on the main street, a block from Dairy Queen, where way too much of the profits were traded for milk shakes.

I had the financial misfortune of delivering papers during the period when the weekly cost went up from $0.60 to $0.75 to $0.90, with an inversely proportional decrease in “keep the change” tips. Perhaps that was the beginning of the demise of local newspapers (the Cleveland Press has been long out of business).

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to quantify the environmental costs of the demise of paper boys. There’s the obvious increase in VMT (pollution, GHGs, oil consumption, etc.) with all those adults driving around in slow circles in the middle of the night. And then there are the millions of rubber bands and plastic bags that get used every day to protect the papers so they can be tossed randomly onto driveways, lawns and into bushes instead of being carefully placed in screen doors, paper boxes and mail slots.

Several other kids in my neighborhood also had routes. The paper dropped bundles at my house for all of us. My little sister & I were latchkey kids. I suspect that my single-parent mother liked the fact that there was a positive activity waiting for me when I got home from school.

It really was a business, but also a lot of fun. I really was acting as an independent contractor. I think my paperboy years are responsible for my love of bicycling even today. (Mrs Dibbly refers to those years as my “Professional Cycling Career”.) It makes me a little sad that kids today don’t get the chance to have this experience.

For some fantastic really old newsboy photos, search shorpy.com.