Studs Terkel once interviewed a paperboy, who had this to say:
I don't see where people get all this bull about
the kid who's going to be President and being
a newsboy made a President out of him. It taught
him to handle his money and this bull. You know
what id did? It taught him to hate the people in
his route. And the printers. And dogs.
Does anyone have any amusing stories to share from his or her newspaper delivery days? The only amusing thing I can remember didn’t actually occur on my route: my brother’s best friend let one of his customers go a ludirously long time without paying. He felt bad about knocking on the door and saying “Hey, you owe me $58.50 for your newspaper.” So he paid me to do it. The person wasn’t suspicious at not recognizing me, but did mention that she had never seen me before.
Do young people even deliver newspapers nowadays? That may be another Thing That Has Changed in Our Lifetimes.
I had a few customers that would refuse to pay for the paper but if it was not delivered they would call my home and yell at me. The route manager was an idiot that would tell me to pay for their newspapers because they were good customers. I would get my revenge by removing whole sections of their paper, remove one page (ususally with the comics), or turn the pages upside down. The last day I delivered papers some customers papers were a little wet and it wasn’t from the rain, I peed on them.
Nationwide, between 1992 and 1997, 99 news vendors were killed on the job, 11 of them were under the age of 18.
Ten years prior to that, I still vividly recall my visually shaken father coming home from his 8-4 patrol, walking to the phone & calling my both my Daily News Manager (from my AM route) & my Newsday Manager (from the PM route) and telling them he wasn’t allowing me to deliver papers, effective immediately. He had just arrived home from a murder scene where a kid from one town west of us in Oceanside had been found raped and bludgeoned to death in a small alleyway between a pizzaria and a video store.
As a rather poor newlywed with no college education, I threw newspapers from my car. I worked 7 days a week for an entire year without taking a day off. I threw the San Bernadino Sun and the LA Times. I would open up the windows of my Pinto and fling papers left and right, and even sometimes over the top of the car. Believe me, the Sunday LA Times weighs about 5 pounds and is a bitch to shotput onto someone’s porch. I was deadly accurate and developed the most awesome arm muscles ever.
The most unusual thing I can remember was early one morning, when all the carriers met in a small garage to divide the papers and wrap them. We used a mechanical machine to tie the papers with a piece of string. You folded the paper and slid it into the machine, then held it tightly so that the string would bind the paper. One of the carriers was not paying attention, and he ended up with a perfect little piece of string punched through the webbing of his hand, between his thumb and next finger. I don’t think we ever saw that guy again.
Having a paper route as a kid was such a rip off! Mine worked out so that at the end of the month, I had to go out and collect the money from subscribers and pay off the paper, who sent me a bill that I had to pay with the money collected. My pay was to be the difference. I was ten years old or so and some people would refuse to pay or answer their doors. So when they didn’t pay, it all came out of my pay and the paper refused to do anything about it! I shared my route with another girl (yes, we were papergirls!) and somehow we got stuck with this huge apartment complex as our route. We were stupid kids so when we had to deliver papers to the third floor apartments, we’d just toss them up there full force rather than walk up the stairs! We broke so many flower pots! Come to think of it, maybe we didn’t deserve our pay…
Laurasia writes: “I was ten years old or so and some people would refuse to pay or answer their doors.”
It does seem like a fundamental flaw to require someone so young to collect money from customers, to in effect, enforce a contract. I was ten when I started throwing papers, and though I don’t really recall anyone refusing to pay outright, I “got the runaround” (my district manager’s favorite expression) from more than one customer. I would like to know what kind of a mindset goes into that kind of behavior. It’s not a faceless corporation attempting to collect the money, but rather, a ten year old!
I had a paper route when i was thirteen. At one point, two other kids quit and i acquired their routes. It was an immense route. The first day of the combined routes I was carrying this massive pile of papers in three of those canvas bags paperboys would carry. The papers were piled so high I couldn’t see where I was walking. The papers on top slid off and landed in a huge pile of dog shit. And then it started raining. I said “screw this” and stuffed all the papers down the sewer. It still makes me laugh.
When delivering the paper I would purposefully throw it as hard as possible at the screen door of the house to make a loud noise.
At the time. milk men used to deliver milk, orange juice and doughnuts to people’s houses and leave it sitting outside right on the porch. Consequently I would steal this stuff from the deadbeats who didn’t pay me.
Sixth grade until I graduated from High School - every damn morning.
I was actually a really good paper girl, (maybe one complaint a year, always delivered dry, on time, and I walked the things to their doors because I can’t aim. I can’t even pretend to aim.) with the exception of collecting money. There were plenty of people who owed 3 or 4 months worth because they wouldn’t be home or whatever, and I hated collecting money. Hated it. hated it. hated it.
It was a small enough route in a close enough neighborhood that there was almost no one my parents didn’t recognize by sight (and if so, they’d recognize the next-door neighbor). So they felt pretty safe having me out there -
and there were some nice things, the sunrises. When it very rarely snowed, I got to see the new fallen snow before it melted or people drove on it. (OTOH, I was out wandering around for an hour in the freezing cold). The time alone to just think every day. And I didn’t have to get a job in fast food.
Nothing really weird - I once got surrounded by some kind of attack dog (this weird family had 3 of whatever they were, nasty things, the people were strange…) while collecting. Eventually the owners got hold of them, and brought them back in. They refused to pay that day.
Now, what was my route and two other routes (at least) have been combined and given to a guy who throws papers out of a truck.
I had a paper route when I was nine. I was a very small little girl, and, I swear…I must have had 100 papers on my route. I did it for a few weeks, but it was just too much for me. So I called my supervisor and told him I was quitting. HE TOLD ME I COULDN’T QUIT. I started crying and told my parents that I had been kidnapped into child slavery. They gave me the old “I told you so” and told me it was perfectly legal for me to quit my paper route. Good thing, too. I was terrified.
I deliver 368 papers every day. I think we have 5 days per year scheduled off, and I treat myself to 2 sick days per year.
I needed a part-time job that paid well and wouldn’t require me to put my babies in daycare, so this fits the bill rather nicely.
Aside from having to get up at 2:30 in the morning, it’s great.
Cool stories? One morning I had a beautiful naked woman walked out onto her porch to look for her paper; had I been a paperGUY instead of a papergirl, it would’ve made my day. I have a pretty good arm and decent aim, but I’ve still managed to break a few things: a porch railing (with one of those godawful Sunday papers), an emergency light, a mailbox (actually I ran over that one). And I’m amazed at the number of times that I’ve thrown a paper only to see it end up balanced on a narrow porch rail.
I deliver a route to a retirement/assisted living place now, and I’ve run across the occasional naked customer there. This morning one of the little old ladies asked me if I had a minute to help her change her shirt, so I did that too.
Aaah, the adventures of paper carrying.
I delivered papers for years as a kid-- and my family eventually took over all the routes for all the papers in the neighbourhood.
But now, all the routes are done by adults, because the papers wiped out the middlemen. You used to have guys who would pick up the papers from the printers, and then deliver them to each route. Now they only deliver them to a central location-- so whoever is delivering has to drive to that point and pick them up by 4 am.
The change wasn’t about reliability, but about saving costs by eliminating hundreds of employees.
I never really had problems collecting, although there was the occasional person that would need to be nagged half a dozen times over two months. I would always try to encourage those folks to pay quarterly or yearly “because it’ll save you money!”
No one ever refused to pay, except when I first got the route-- but that was because in those days, the paperboy could start people up, schedule their vacations, etc… Turns out the previous guy had signed up a bunch of people to win a contest!
Once, delivering on a Saturday morning, I came across my customer having sex with his girlfriend on the front porch. At 5:30 in the morning. Seeing two white-trash 20-somethings naked first thing in the morning was not a good way for a 14 year old boy to start his day.
Besides that, my greatest memory is of Mrs. Donaldson, a very elderly woman that I delivered to, and also ran the occasional errand for. She was the only person I ever knew who had great-great-grandchildren. I figure she was at least 85 years old but still lived on her own in a small but neat 2nd floor walk-up apartment.
When I lived in Colorado, the paper was delivered by an adult, in a car. It got thrown onto the driveway. If they got it too close to the edges of the driveway, it got watered on by our sprinklers. If it was windy, it got blown all over creation. They’d miss our house at least once every month, or deliver it long after I’d left for work. I used to long for an old fashioned paperboy who would put the @#@# paper on the front porch!
Back in my small hometown, a teenage boy delivers my paper. He places in in the newspaper holder attached to my mailbox on my front porch. My paper has never been wet, blown away, or otherwise mistreated. He’s never missed a day, and the paper is always on time. I send my payments directly to the paper, so he never has to worry about me not being home when he collects.
