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!
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| Marshal (right, Me (left) 50 years later |
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| Woody (right) and me (left) on a press break |
