Sunday, October 6, 2013

PERILS OF A PAPERBOY (Published Binghamton Press, September 22, 2013)


I was nine years old when I started in the newspaper business. The impetus came from a book I read in my fourth grade classroom at Longfellow School on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a story about two boys who published a neighborhood newspaper called the Tom Thumb. I’ve forgotten the name of the book, but not the rush I felt when my friend Woody (Walls) and I formed a partnership and produced our own neighborhood paper, shamelessly stealing its name from the one in the book.

With notebooks in hand, we went door-to-door, signing up subscribers and gathering news. The premier issue was printed (typos, cross outs, eraser smears and all) on a gelatin printing press, a letter-size tray filled with a semi-solid gel mix that captured the impression from a freshly typed page and transferred it to a blank sheet of paper. It reproduced four or five images before becoming too faint to read; we reimprinted the master and started over again. It took all day Saturday to type and print copies of the first edition. We delivered it to twenty-seven subscribers on Chadwick and Denton Roads just in time for dinner.  By the next afternoon the neighborhood was abuzz. We had a "Best Seller" on our hands. We strutted around with big heads, taking great pride in our literary skills, clueless that we’d simply produced a neighborhood gossip sheet. One that covered dirt from every family on the block.

Our juicy news items came from the kids, not the parents. The paper grew from a single page publication to a multi-page rag. We were forced to switch from the gelatin press to a mimeograph machine at my father’s office. Twelve editions were produced in this manner and then the enterprise imploded. Our news sources dried up, as one by one, the parents figured out who had provided the perfectly accurate description of a plate throwing argument or some other embarrassing bit of gossip that took place in their very own home. The whistleblower was identified and silenced. Probably got a “time-out” too.

Customers had only been mildly interested in the mundane happenings around the neighborhood: a back yard barbeque at the Colavito’s, a visit from out town relatives at the Almy’s, Hank Merz’s new Ford, the newfangled, 6 inch, black and white TV at the Soldo’s or the bite the mailman received from Hunsinger’s pet duck. It was neighbors’ dirty laundry that wet their appetite. When it stopped coming, the paper’s circulation plummeted.  

My second venture into the newspaper business came a few years later. I started helping some of the older kids on the south side to deliver newspapers. It was an unpaid job (an internship of sorts) that I volunteered for, hoping to “inherit” a route when the owner moved on to a better paying and more prestigious job, like bagging groceries at the Loblaws Supermarket on Vestal Ave.

I applied for working papers when I turned fourteen and bought a route from Ronnie Gordon. He moved on to greener pastures, working at his father’s “East End Appliance” store on Robinson Street. I paid thirty-five dollars, an astronomical investment for a kid in 1956. The management at the Press didn’t allow their routes to be sold, but it was a policy they couldn’t enforce. Thirty-five dollars was the going rate on the black market; the investment was usually paid off on the installment plan. I signed a contract on a Saturday afternoon, acknowledging the debt and my promise to pay a dollar a week for thirty-five weeks, and delivered my first set of papers the next morning. And, as any paperboy from that era can attest, it was the heaviest paper of the week, the hardest to deliver. Sunday was the only day the Binghamton Evening Press came out in the morning. The rest of the week it rolled off the presses on Chenango Street just in time for the “man of the house” to sit back with it in his recliner chair and wait for his wife to announce that dinner was ready. It truly was an “Ozzie and Harriet world back then.

The papers for my route were dropped off at the corner of Vestal Avenue and Brookfield Road. Marshal Reutlinger’s papers were dropped there as well, but his route was so big he had to parcel it out to assistants. His cousin (my friend) Woody handled one of the sections, sometimes delivering the papers to his house on Denton and mine on Chadwick. It kind of galled me that I couldn’t deliver my own paper, that it was part of Marshal’s empire. He was the titan of the south side newspaper delivery business.   

I had 63 customers on a route that started at the corner of Kendal and Brookfield, went along Kendal for a block, up Allendale and then westward on Moore where it ended at the intersection with Chadwick, three doors up the hill from where I lived. The newspapers came in a bundle, tightly bound by a piece of metal wire. If you worked at it, you get the middle copy out, easing the tension on the rest of the bundle. A well-equipped newsboy, like Marshal, carried a slotted wire cutter the size of a silver dollar that would break the wire with a few simple twists. The papers were then loaded into a canvas shoulder bag, folded with an interlocking twist and tossed from the sidewalk to customers’ front porches. (I had an accuracy rate of about 75%). Some customers insisted I walk to the house and put the paper inside their storm door. (The very same customers that apparently considered it immoral to tip a paperboy).

On Monday nights I went back over the route for a first pass at collections. Some kids did it as they delivered, but I never found that very productive. Collecting was a chore I dreaded. I heard every excuse in the book  -  “I already paid you. –  My husband paid you! My husband isn’t home. – We paid you for two weeks last week.  – I don’t have any change. - Can you break a fifty, ha ha?  I heard it all, but I had a collection book with a tear off stub for every week of the year for every customer. Even the cheapskates who borrowed a neighbor’s stub couldn’t fool me. But it was brutal; dog bites, multi-calls, lies and doorbells that mysteriously didn’t work when I pressed the button. I earned every cent of the nine bucks I netted each week. I had to make sure I had enough money to pay “Tony Soprano,” the circulation manager, when he came to my door on Saturday morning. He didn’t accept excuses. He didn’t take checks.

Tips were few and far between. A customer’s weekly bill was forty-five cents. You would think that when I asked for the payment of 45 cents, a customer might hand me two quarters every once in a while and say, “Keep the change kid!” After all, I’d delivered the paper every day and made sure it never got wet. But, NO! I can count on one hand the number of customers who tipped. (And to add insult to injury, Marshall got my parents to tip him because he was smart enough to say thanks and walk away with the fifty cents, leaving it them to call him back for their change, which they, and many of his customers seldom did.) 

Still, that eight or nine dollar profit was a fortune to me. My bike was equipped with every imaginable accessory: chrome fenders, baskets, horns, reflectors and even an expensive and highly coveted generator-light. The rest was squandered too, on soda (which we called soft drink), penny candy, yo-yos, badminton birdies, baseballs, kites and balsa wood gliders. I never saved a cent. But, for two years I was the richest kid on the block (except for Marshal).

Now, more that five decades later, I’m still in the newspaper business, writing “Old Coot” and “Memories” articles that are published here and there, longing for just one more afternoon to pound the pavement on my old route with a canvas paper bag full of papers slung over my shoulder. But alas, there is no Evening Press and the ghosts of the dogs who terrorized me back then are still on the prowl. Someday, my ghost will come by to take them on yet again. This time I’ll be carrying a can of pepper spray! 
Marshal (right, Me (left) 50 years later

Woody (right) and me (left) on a press break

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