I posted this last year, and I think it might become an annual thing…. An ode to print media, young girls, and small towns.
(I was, of course, a girl. And on a bike. But just try to find that statue).
I used to deliver newspapers.
First it was the Chicago Daily News, then, when that venerable afternoon institution folded, the Chicago Tribune. I was about 11, 12-ish (the age my boy is now, and I occasionally ask him why he hasn’t yet found gainful employ), though I’m not sure of the exact stop and start dates.
I had a paper-girl’s bike with a huge metal basket in front and metal panniers on the sides; if I didn’t remove the papers evenly as I went along, the bike would topple over, newspaper sections slithering out and sliding across lawns. Sometimes it would topple over anyway.
I always placed each individual paper carefully between the storm and front doors; if a person’s storm was locked, I would find some other safe place to tuck it. By the end of my route, my hands would be blackened by the newsprint, a particular kind of smeary black that dries the skin and transfers itself onto everything you might subsequently touch.
I hated it.
Not just the filthy hands, but the whole experience — oh my God, I hated delivering newspapers.
I remember promising myself that I would never allow my own children to do it, because if they did, I would occasionally get saddled with the task, and I was not going to ever deliver papers again — and this from a girl growing up in a house where the mom only ever took over your job if you were literally unable to do it. It was, after all, my job — unlike some newspaper pansies, my mom didn’t throw me in the station wagon to get it done of a morning.
That was the worst of it, really. The mornings.
I didn’t like the afternoon Daily News route — it was lonely and boring, and kind of embarrassing, if you ran across someone from school, or some damn friendly adult that you knew. I would talk to myself, make up stories, essentially play make-believe at an age when I think most kids weren’t doing that anymore. It was on my paper route that I was Magna Woman, a superhero whose power came from a mysteriously exotic (if cheap) ring that I had purchased at the Field Museum on a field trip.
But the morning route — oh good God, that was just a whole other level of misery. For a child in the Midwest, it not only meant god-awful alarm-clock setting, it also mostly meant Dark.
Even if dawn arrived while I was out, I started my day in pitch black, a lighting scheme that at the time still frightened me. I seem to recall having to talk myself down daily from some inchoate fear.
And the cold. Oh God, I was always cold! I don’t have a single memory of not being cold on my morning route — and surely there were spring and summer mornings, as well. But they don’t remain. Just the cold, and the dark, and the lonely streets, and the whirligig mind of an imaginative 11 year old. Twelve year old.
One day it was about like it is as of this writing (the high for Chicago: 8, the actual temperature: 2, and the windchill? -20), and when I got to the Currens’ house, I found a note. “Emily – Ring the bell. There’s hot cocoa waiting.”
The Currens were my grandparents’ good friends, lovely people who I was always happy to see myself whenever I happened to helping out at one of my grandmother’s famous and well-loved grown-up parties. I would walk around in my best outfit with trays of crackers, and some people would look me in the 11 year old eyes, and some people wouldn’t. Some people would know the right way to be friendly, and some people wouldn’t. The Currens were always in the first group.
But it’s my sense that the Currens would have made hot cocoa for anyone who happened to arrive with a folded newspaper in sub-zero weather — they were that kind of people. When I think of them, pretty much all I see are belted robes, broad smiles, and eyes like welcome signs.
I sat, I drank, and Mr. Curren took me around on the rest of my route (here the grandparent connection might have played a role). If memory serves, they did this for me one other time, as well, each time saying “Oh, you’re welcome, Emily! Any time!”
And I know they meant it, because the one time I knocked in spite of there not being a note, in spite of the fact that it was a balmy 17 degrees or maybe 23, they wiped the sleep from their eyes and put the pot on the stove. They were good people, the Currens.
God I hated that route. But there remains within me a powerful sense of pride that I did it, that I was good at it, and that I later got a chance to actually write for the paper that I had delivered. For the girl with the topple-over bike, that was quite a heady thing.
And the Currens gave me cocoa and smiles on days like today, in the middle of coldest, darkest winter.
Bill Harshaw
/ January 25, 2012Did you ever read Henry Petroski’s memoir of being a paperboy on Long Island? http://www.amazon.com/Paperboy-Confessions-Engineer-Henry-Petroski/dp/0375718982/ref=sr_1_16?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327526030&sr=1-16
Been a while since I read it, but this review from the Amazon site gives the flavor:
Petroski wrote this charming memoir while on sabbatical from Duke University (where he is chair of the civil engineering department) to show how being a paperboy “prepared [him] for becoming an engineering student and, ultimately, an engineer.” The book focuses on his adolescent years from 1954 to 1958, following the family’s move on his 12th birthday from Brooklyn to Cambria Heights, Queens. Petroski (The Evolution of Useful Things) was given a bicycle for that birthday and shortly thereafter acquired a paper route. He maintained the route for four years, as he moved from grammar school to high school and broadened his interests into girls, reading, machines, etc., and along the way learned about life as only adolescents can. The writing is Petroski at his best: clear, flowing, interesting, and fun. Readers get a glimpse of life in the 1950s, with delightful details, for example, on train sets, bicycles, street layouts, newspapers, and bingo, none of which slows down the story as readers are drawn into the Petroski family. Highly recommended for all collections
p
Stephen "Yolly" Yolland
/ January 25, 2012Emily, that story was utterly charming. Sometimes your writing reaches heights that leave me, as a fellow professional, gasping. Thank you for the heart-warming start to my day.
In the UK, being a paper boy was even more exhausting. Unlike the USA, where papers are vaguely flung in the direction of the front yard, in the UK they were always delivered through the letterbox. Which was usually an integral component of a front door, rather than intelligently stuck on a pole at the front gate. Up the end of a path or driveway, most likely. Covered in ice, in the pre-dawn. Bikes were impractical, you’d have been on and off the thing 500 times a morning. So, rain, hail, snow or shine, one walked, carrying a bag weighing about the same as as a small car on one’s ten year old frame. A bag that was made of a sort of hessian, that got heavier and smellier as it got wetter from the freezing rain that came in horizontally off the English Channel. Sooner or later the papers inside would get wet, and start to stick together, until eventually the whole interior started to resemble a sort of papier mâché sculpture of indistinct design.
Oh, how we laughed.
There were compensations. Sophie, the new girl with impossibly blue eyes who had moved into the yellow house down the road, used to sit in her bedroom window eating her rice crispies and wave to me as I squeezed the Daily Telegraph through their impossibly small letterbox. She went away the next year, to big school, until a hot summer some eight years later, when we endured one awful first – and last – kiss in the back of a taxi after a date where neither of us could think of anything to say. We should have left it at a lonely wave and a gentle smile that made the unendurable worthwhile.
Never go back.
emilylhauser
/ January 26, 2012o_O Now I feel cheated. I never got so much as a kiss out of my paper route!
The funny thing is I have no recollection whatsoever of what I did when it rained — those panniers were entirely open of course and everything would have gotten soaked. I suspect there was some judicious use of garbage bags or something….
Stephen "Yolly" Yolland
/ January 25, 2012You literally inspired me – duly credited
http://wellthisiswhatithink.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/on-newspaper-delivering-and-first-love/
CTVoter
/ January 25, 2012I never delivered newspapers. But the cold dark mornings of winter in upstate New York stay with me to this day. There was something creepy in waking up and going to school in the dark.
dmf
/ January 26, 2012I delivered papers in the frozen netherworld of Syracuse NY mornings and it was part of my initiation into the behind the scenes, in the shadows, world of unseen/unacknowledged people that labor to make available what we often take for granted, out of sight and out of mind.
dave in texas
/ January 26, 2012I delivered papers for several years, and like you, I have vivid memories of delivering them through cold and snow (don’t let anybody ever tell you it doesn’t get below zero in the Texas Panhandle). I always walked my route, the better to develop my arm by throwing from the street and still hitting the porch.
I stopped delivering papers when a milkman stopped me one morning and asked if I wanted to work for him at more than the twice the pay I was getting on my paper route. The answer was yes. Of course, I could no longer work on my throwing arm, as a bottle (yes, bottle; if you’ll recall, I am an old) of milk explodes on landing if thrown from the curb. He’s retired now, but I used to sometimes see him out on his route when I’d go back to Amarillo, and he’d invariably give me a carton of chocolate milk to drink while we chatted. Is there still home milk delivery anywhere? I seriously doubt it. Too bad.