Did you ever have a paper route?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I did, since I was 13. The Hartford Courant - America’s oldest continuously published newspaper. By 0630 Mon-Sat, and by 0830 Sundays. In snow, ice, rain, and wind. I didn’t mind the weather but for me the worst was the windy days. I hated windy days.

Some paid cash when I collected weekly. Some paid to the company. And I squared up every week at the local office in West Hartford where I live. I never got stiffed by my customers. I can’t imagine what I’d do if that happened. Yelling at 11pm, “COLLECTING!!” ?? I doubt I’d have the gumption to try that.

I made $8 a week. Decent money, back then. My mom never cut my hair again and, I thought it was better to pay for my own haircut than to have it done for free by my mom. Not too smart!

I kept delivering until I turned 16, when I could get a “real” job. Minimum wage was $2.32 then. In one night I made more as a busboy than I did delivery papers, so I quit the route.

I’ve been working ever since, and now I am 60. And I’m still an early riser.

22

Yes; father didn’t believe in an allowance. Alas, the routes in my part of town were taken—but then construction began on a big new apartment complex nearby. I convinced the Texarkana Gazette that this was newly created territory they should award to me. Eventually—I’ve forgotten just how or why—they calved off four smaller apartment complexes in the area and gave them to me as a second route.

In those days, carriers collected in arrears, but with a new route I was able to set a policy of payment in advance, which cut my losses from those footloose apartment dwellers. To prevent theft by neighboring tenants, I threw the papers onto the apartments’ balconies or enclosed patios. Tricky business if I missed the balcony and the paper fell into the fenced patio of a nonsubscriber.

Collecting was my least favorite part. For some reason, I remember being self-conscious about responding “paperboy” to the shout from inside “who is it?” But they didn’t seem to understand “Gazette carrier.” I don’t know why just “COLLECTING!” never occurred to me.

The money wasn’t great, but it bought me a 10-speed bike to run the route with, and I saved a couple thousand dollars that was part of the down payment on my first home. When I went off to college, my sister and then my mother kept the routes for a few more years.

23

My older brother had a route delivering the afternoon paper, although the Sunday paper was in the morning. When another boy wanted to quit his route I took over. A couple were the managers and looking back, they were the type if people who were just doing odd jobs and such but we loved their freedom.

We collected monthly and there was one single mother family that was hard to collect from.

When I tried to collect from family one month, the wife said the had stopped the paper for that month and had left for an extended vacation.

Supposedly a concerned neighbor was picking up the paper each day so people wouldn’t know they were gone but didn’t say anything so I kept delivering. I hadn’t received notice and didn’t think the manager would help so I had to personally eat that. They had money but made a 12-year-old eat the cost of someone else’s mistake. Assholes.

And the husband was one of the top leaders of the Mormon church so it’s not I could have won any dispute.

24

My older brother had a paper route for a few months and a few times I got roped into helping him out. I had zero interest in doing it and he couldn’t have had much more interest since he quit relatively soon.

25

Yes. I’ve forgotten a lot about it, like how old I was or how big the route was. Some lady acted as a distribution center out of her house and received all the papers for multiple routes. I’d show up with my wagon and load up the appropriate number of papers. I must have been able to deal with rain and snow but I don’t remember how; obviously it could not have been particularly onerous. I was responsible for collections, which was rarely problematic and generally got good tips. I think I paid the distribution lady every week. I eventually saved enough to buy a pretty good 35mm camera that I could never have been able to afford otherwise. It was quite a remarkable professional camera for a little kid to have.

26

I delivered Newsday in my early teens. It was an evening paper at the time, so I’d get home from school and there’d be a bale of papers in my driveway. I don’t recall if I walked the route or rode my bike, but I do recall dropping the paper off on people’s porches or between the doors if the weather was bad.

I dealt with collecting all the money. I don’t recall how I sent it off once I got it, though.

27

A friend asked me to cover his route for a month when I was 13 or 14. The route was near his house, about 2 miles from me. I got the papers from some guy who delivered a huge region out of a convertible that he would fill to the rim with papers; he lived close to me, but my recollection is that the drop was near my friend’s house. I’d bike down there, deliver the route, then bike home, before heading to school. It wasn’t a huge route, but I remember enough people stiffed me on collections at the end of the month that I took a loss on it. When my friend asked if I wanted to take over permanently, I couldn’t tell him “oh hell no” emphatically enough. I think convertible-dude ended up delivering that route, too.

28

I delivered the Pittsburgh Press, an afternoon paper, when I was a kid. I had a few famous customers, including heavyweight fighter Billy Conn. He was “punch drunk”, which made me nervous.

There were always people who weren’t home when I collected. I’d collect enough to pay my manager when he came to collect, but my profits were always floating out there.

29

My first husband and I had a 60-mile motor paper route in Arlington, Texas, around 1970. We threw the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald. I was also a graduate teaching assistant and he worked in a body shop. Our total income from all three jobs was about $500/month.

As others have said, we had to collect, and incredibly, some people just wouldn’t pay. :rage: PLUS we had to buy our own rubber bands and plastic bags from the paper if we wanted to use them, which cut seriously into our income. So we both developed the skill of wrapping the rolled-up paper with string, sliding the string down over itself to “tie” it, and breaking the string, seconds before he tossed the paper out the window to someone’s yard. Meanwhile I’m rolling the next one.

It was an afternoon route (in the days when many papers had two daily editions), but we threw the Sunday paper in the morning. That meant going to pick up the papers and the ad/magazine inserts about 2:00 am, combining them, and stacking them in the bed of the pickup truck his father had given us as a wedding present. The bundled papers usually filled the entire bed of the truck. We must have used expensive plastic bags for those. We usually bought a big bucket of KFC before starting the task. Oh, for the days when one could eat fried chicken in the middle of the night without a care. Today, that would kill me.

The Ford truck was a standard transmission, and that paper route is where I really learned to drive it. Crash (as it were) course-- all that starting, stopping, backing up, turning around, rushing across busy multi-lane streets without stalling – every day for several hours.

30

I didn’t, but a cousin did. His route included a big apartment house. Easy, right? Just hop on the elevator and walk (inside) from one apartment to the next. But he was constantly being stiffed when people moved.

Good book: Paperboy: Confessions of a future engineer. (2002) by Henry Petroski. Mr. Petroski mentions that routes were always available in January. Paperboys would hang on to the end of the year to get December gratuities, then didn’t want to face the dark mornings of the new year.

And, don’t ask about dogs…

31

My brother (and usually our mom) did it for several years in his early teens. He had to collect, too. He actually looks back on it fondly, and even used “Paper Boy” as his CD handle.

When I was in college in the early 1990s, I signed up to do it one summer because they needed someone to deliver the Wednesday pennysaver in my neighborhood, which was made up mostly of student apartments. I gave it up within a month after I realized they weren’t going to pay me.

32

I had forgotten that part. Our local 4H leader’s house was the drop-off point and we would go up there on Saturday evenings to assemble the first two portions of the paper: the want-ads and the comics with inserts. In the wee hours of Sunday, the news portion would be dropped off and we would wrap the other sections of the paper in that before stacking in the cart for delivery.

Two memories: 1) we quickly learned to insert the comics into the want-ads in the reverse direction to lessen the chance of the inserts falling everywhere and 2) November and December absolutely sucked to deliver because there were so many ads. We often could only fit half the route’s papers into the cart during that time and would have to return to the drop point for the other half of the papers. Biggest paper of the year was the Sunday before Thanksgiving and the thinnest was Christmas Day

33

Yes, when I was 12. Can’t remember the pay - it was something like 4p per paper with extra for Sunday papers and extra for flats and a couple of difficult to reach houses. The bag was monstrously heavy! Used to start at 5am when the newsagents opened, putting the bag on my bike. (I had a second before-school job at the market - I was a hard-working 12-year-old and school started at 8:45 - so starting later wasn’t really an option).

In England you don’t put newspapers on the front step, let alone throw them onto the lawn like they do in the movies (I assume the latter is only in the movies?), you’re expected to put them through the letterbox. So you have to walk up to every door. Our front yards are much much smaller, and some of my deliveries were flats, so that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the letterboxes. Most of them were too small for anything except the Sun or Mirror, thin tabloid newspapers (normal people read them - they’re not like the national enquirer). Some of them were so narrow even tabloids were a challenge.

There was one family that complained when the front cover of the Sunday Times was torn because I’d put it in in one go, but I’d only done that because they also complained when I’d taken the newspaper apart into sections to put it through. It was not physically possible to put the newspaper through without doing one or the other. I dinnae think they understand the laws of physics, Cap’n.

Not long after I’d started, a man started following me around, at 5am in the pitch dark with no-one else around. Black beanie, big black bomber jacket, blank face. He’d just appear, standing and staring at me. Gradually he got closer and closer. By one house with a large entrance and lots of trees he’d often stand waiting and watching. Fortunately it had a slight slope so I could zip past on my bike, but it still felt scary. Told myself I was just being a wimp and there was some innocent explanation.

Then one day, in summer, at a block of flats, I was walking up the stairs reading the front page of the paper I was about to deliver, and he was standing on the stairs. I ignored him. Felt something soft and sort of rubbery on my bare arm, looked down, and it was his penis.

My fears hadn’t been unfounded at all.

I just kept walking, delivered the paper, then waited until one of the neighbours was leaving the house and walked down the stairs with them. There was a turning on the stairway; he could have been waiting for me, and quite possibly was.

Quit immediately. Told the newsagent why. He laughed at me for being scared of a “flasher.”

I think I probably avoided being raped and possibly a lot worse.

34

Reminds me of the mildly developmentally disabled paperboy who went missing. A few weeks later, one of my friends was exploring out in the sticks searching out places to hold keggers, as we did, and found him hanging in an off-season KOA cabin.

35

I think you’re right. Thank goodness my mother sent another brother out with me when I went to collect on the paper deliveries.

36

In the 60’s, I delivered the morning paper for some years. No Sundays, and the paper was almost always thin enough to fold and toss onto the porch. Never a problem “collecting” - a middle-class neighborhood with all single-family dwellings. Christmas was always good for tips (a couple of people gave me $5, which was a lot at the time).

During summers, other carriers in the area would go on vacation and I would replace them. I think my peak was just over 200 papers - with half of them a two-mile bike ride away from my “home” routes. That area was heavily Jewish, and you learned not to collect on the Sabbath, or you checked for the mezuzah on the door frame.

Fun times - kept me busy from 5:30 to 7 am.

37

I wanted one when I was 8. My sole reason for wanting one was that I had just started collecting Transformers and my allowance was rather small. My mother was not enthusiastic about the idea, and claimed that it was a very poor-paying job for which I would be paid “three pennies” or something like that (I’m pretty sure that’s not true - having a paper route is not very lucrative, but I’m pretty sure it would have supplemented my allowance VERY well, not to mention taught me some responsibility). I insisted, though and my mother said she would call the local newspaper and inquire about it. She came back and told me that they only took kids from, let’s say 10 years old and up.

38

Way back when I was the typical age, there were paper boys, not paper girls. Not that I wanted the job, but if I did, it wouldn’t have been an option. At least, not to my mother, and I suspect not to the Baltimore Sun either. Anyway, babysitting was easier.

39

I had a paper route for the local afternoon paper when I was 13. There were 66 weekday subscribers and 77 on Sunday. The stack of papers in front of my house was taller than I was on Sunday mornings.

That paper route ruined my Sears ten-speed bicycle, so my mom bought me this fancy “Paper Boy Special” bike that weighed a ton and was built like a tank. It sported wire saddlebag baskets in the back for the papers. My brother and I would take turns riding “The Tank” on Sunday mornings as we delivered papers to the various nooks and crannies specified by the customers (“In milk chute by back door.” What’s a “milk chute”? Interesting…an insulated milk box mounted in the wall with a door on the outside and a door on the inside. Cool.)

It truly sucked to never have a day off. If I wanted a single day off, I had to find someone to do my route.
Collecting was a cast iron pain in the backside–paperboy-eating dogs, people who never were home, and so on.

At one point I managed to have a gang of local kids harassing me as I tried to make my deliveries. That was fun.

Most troubling for me, we collected the money at the beginning of the month (and throughout the month) and paid our bill to the News at the end of the month. That was too much for this 13-year-old to do without frittering the money away in the middle of the month. I managed to get myself in quite a bit of financial trouble, and that ended my paperboy career.

It wasn’t until years later that I considered how close I had probably been to many creepy citizens. With 77 houses, there had to be one or two dangerous folks out there, and I would go inside their houses without any worry if they invited me.

There were nice people around though–there was a nice old couple that invited my brother and me to use their pool whenever we wanted (it wasn’t too clean, so we went once or twice). There was some dude with a super gnarly drunk-man’s nose who would sell me the awesome fireworks from the Deep South that we couldn’t get in our state.

It was just another square in my checkered past.

40

Yeah - before the “flasher” incident, that was one of the things I hated most. I know it was only a couple of hours a day, but it’s every day. You need a full day off. Even my morning market job (which was till 4pm on Saturdays) gave me a day off and knew people who could cover for me.

I missed out on things like an overnight drama trip because I was working for a low enough amount at a stupidly early time of day that nobody else wanted to do it.

It’s weird that a traditional job for children is not really very suitable for children.