OME MEMORIES THAT KEN SHARED WITH ME OF HIS YEARS AS A PAPERBOY.

A Salute to earlier, young Laborers

Do you know the person who delivers your news every morning? I don’t.  Paperboys used to be a kid from your neighborhood. Ken, my husband,  remembered carrying the Republic and Gazette in the early 1940’s.

“Our station was located in front of a Chinese grocery store West of the State Capitol. When it rained, someone dragged the bundles into the doorway so they wouldn’t get wet.  We took turns folding our papers in the shelter. There were no plastic sleeves; we put our jackets over our canvas paper bags. We figured we could pedal fast enough to go between the raindrops.”

“On Sundays, after our regular route, we picked up papers from to R & G building, to deliver skipped customer for a chance to earn extra money. They gave us each ten extra papers. We rode over to Five Points intersection and sold them for 25 cents each. It added up.”

“ I recall one mischievous kid who lived in my neighborhood. In the mornings, he waited until he was a couple blocks from home so that his mother wouldn’t know and then turned on his bicycle siren. It was mounted on the frame and a spring held it against the tire. You could hear him all the way down to his station at Seventeenth Avenue and Buckeye Road. One morning a sheriff requested that he remove it.”

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“I carried around 250 Republic papers in the morning and over 200 Gazettes in the afternoon. We collected every month and every customer knew us by name. I don’t remember how much we were paid per paper, but I made around $120 a month, not bad for a kid in the sixth grade. For any kid who wanted to work and wasn’t afraid to get up at 5 A. M. it was a great job because it didn’t interfere with school. I was able to maintain good grades and even trade up every time a new model Schwinn came out.”

“Those fine old homes around the State Capitol had big porches and the customers insisted their papers be porched. We didn’t realize it probably sounded like a thunderclap at 5 A. M. when it hit as we pedaled by.” ”

“The boys took their job seriously,” he concluded. “There was a great rivalry among the guys about who could go the longest without getting any “kicks” (complaints.) If one of the guys was really late, we would hide half his papers. It was a good incentive to get to the station on time.”

“If you were sick it was your responsibility to find your sub. No parents were out delivering your papers in their cars. It was easier to just drag yourself out of bed and do the route.”

I knew Ken was serious about his job. We were in the eighth grade when I took my first ride on the cross bar of that Schwinn, on our way to a Girl Scout dance.  We started to fall and just before we hit, the bike swooped upright again. I commented on how strong he was and he replied, “Shoot, you’re about as heavy as the Sunday papers!”