Paperboy

Me 1957 with my paperboy bike

Pulling a wet newspaper from a soggy plastic bag in the driveway on a recent rainy morning took me back in time. To the day when paperboys biked routes and, from 15 or more feet lofted a folded or rolled morning edition, hopefully, next to the front door. This is just one of my life experiences I took for granted that has become a dinosaur.

I never relished the notion of getting out of a warm bed at 5 o’clock on a winter morning and biking a few miles before school delivering 45 or so newspapers from my bicycle basket. But I feel richer for having lived the experience. Having a newspaper route was part of growing up in Lafayette, Indiana in the 1950s. I did it for the money and made $5 or $6 a week which I spent on a haircut, a movie, or a frozen custard cone from the popular shop called the Frozen Custard.

Lafayette in the mid-50s was a city of about 35,000 and had two newspapers: the evening Lafayette Journal & Courier and the morning Indianapolis Star. I lived in a house in central Lafayette.

My House In Lafayette

When I was 9 or 10 an older neighbor boy convinced me to let him train me, without pay, to take over his Journal & Courier paper route near my house. I learned about all his subscribers' houses and eventually, he said I had earned his trust and could deliver all the papers. He stayed at his house like a good manager while I did the work. After a few months of managing me, with no commitment to getting the route, I applied for a route with the local Indianapolis Star office run by a man named Harry Sealy. My older brothers, Steve and Warren, both had Star paper routes.

Star Manager Harry Seely 1961

Soon the Star newspaper truck would drop off three bundles of daily papers (double on Sunday) around 5-5:30 a.m. in front of our house. Each bundle had a wire around it. We brought them into the living room and used a small circular metal tool with several notches in it to twist and break the wire. On Sunday mornings the bundles needed to be assembled and ended up filling the living room floor. I folded them so I could put them in my bike basket and I got pretty good at throwing them from my bike. Folding them in a small square shape was the most accurate with distance although I had to lead the porches as I rode by. If the paper was thicker I flipped one section around and tucked the open section into the flipped section. I only used rubber bands to secure Sunday papers which had several big sections. Needless to say, my hands were covered each day with newsprint ink.

One memory involves a run-in with a stray dog while riding my bike delivering papers. The dog started barking and going for my foot while I pedaled, keeping me off balance. I started throwing folded papers at him but it just seemed to encourage his trying to bite me. I remember heading for home about a quarter a mile away and throwing papers at him the whole way home, leaving a string of papers along the way. My mother went out and picked up the trail of papers, I waited a while and went back out and delivered them without seeing the dog again.

Another memory is of finishing delivery and returning home at about 7 a.m. for breakfast of dry cereal- Wheaties, Raisin Bran, or maybe Wheat Chek. After I poured the milk on the cereal, I opened an extra paper and went first to the comics to follow one of the continuing strip stories. The Sunday comics were the best as they were in color and comic strips like my favorite, Prince Valiant, told a continuous story. I might check the sports page but didn’t pay attention to anything else but the headlines.

Collecting from customers was one of the aggravations of being a paperboy. I was given a half-size three-ring binder with pages for each subscriber, and it was up to me to collect weekly and keep records of whether they had paid. Generally, I collected weekly paper bills from customers on Saturday morning, but, for some people, I’d go on Thursday after dinner as it was the best time to catch them. Daily subscribers paid 30 cents a week, and daily and Sunday paid 45 cents so I collected 30 or 45 cents per week. Collecting took some time. There were always a few I had to go back to because they didn’t seem to be at home didn’t want to answer the door, or didn’t have change. I had one of those belt change dispensers loaded with nickels, dimes, and quarters.

Christmas was always a good time of the year for paperboys. My brothers and I used to hand-made Christmas cards and put them in the papers before the last collection day before Christmas. The subscriber had to be a real Scrooge not to give me a Christmas gift- the best Christmas tip was a new $10 bill from a subscriber who was the president of the Lafayette National Bank. Mr. Sealy always gave each paperboy at Christmas one of those awful boxes of chocolate-covered cherries.

Every Saturday morning, I carried my collections in a canvas bag and showed up at the Star’s office to pay my bill. Mr. Sealy ran the office, he knew how many papers he delivered to me for the week and demanded cash, no checks, and preferably no change. Any extra I had was mine to keep.

My biggest aggravation of being a paperboy was the Star’s insistence on my canvassing for new subscribers. I remember going 6 months or so without a new subscriber. Mr. Sealy hired a Purdue college student who met me with a car and took me to houses along my route that were not subscribers. I will never forget the first house we visited and trying to remember sales lines before anyone came to the door. When a man opened the door, my statement was “You don’t want to subscribe to the Star do you?” I knew from that point on in my life that selling was not my strong point. On the other hand, my older brother won a trip for signing up the most new subscribers and later won a college scholarship from the Star.