My paper-boy career started with my subbing for my two
oldest brothers, Dan and Bill, earning dimes and quarters. But I didn’t achieve
the elite status of an income earner until I had a route of my own. That
happened at the start of the fourth grade.
I don’t remember how I got that route. Maybe Mom made
phone calls to the Sidney Daily News
circulation manager, maybe she didn’t. But I had a SDN route and I was cool.
Carrying a new,
white canvas newspaper bag to school with my books in it meant I had joined the
world of workingmen. (A world I still like to think I inhabit today.) I felt
like I wasn’t a kid anymore, even though as a shrimp of a kid, my route bag
hung nearly to the ground. Not only did I have a job, but I had the accoutrement
to prove it. Ahh, status!
When I first had a delivery route, the carriers picked
up their papers at the SDN office in
downtown Sidney. It was here that I spent a large chunk of my earnings. There
was a bakery across the alley and an ice cream parlor three doors down. Plus,
on the way to my route there were two gas stations that sold sodas and ice
cream.
Being a wage earner meant that I could be a consumer of
other things, too. Soon I had a used but nice red Huffy Flyer and then a basket
on the front to hold my paper bag. Using a bike to deliver papers meant doing
the route faster, but I learned walking had it advantages, too. My aim for
tossing the papers onto the front porch was much better while walking, and
missing a porch while riding meant getting off my bike, correcting my bad throw,
and returning to my bike. It probably didn’t take that much time, but an errant
throw interrupted my day-dreaming, a habit I frequently engaged in as a child.
My favorite time for flights of fancy was on a rainy
fall day, when the street gutters ran with rain, carrying fallen leaves with it.
I liked making leaf and stick dams, patching the leaks until my dam could hold
no more, then breaching it. I would fantasize about what would happen to the
townspeople, houses, and cars carried away in the flood. Delivering papers was
where I really honed my fantasizing skills. And it made the route seem shorter.
There was a down side with being a paper carrier, too -
collecting payment for my deliveries. Every Friday I had to knock at each customer’s door
and ask for money. This wasn’t too much of a concern with most of my customers because
I had a “good” route. This meant clean, stable, middle-class families who didn’t
move out without paying, who answered the door on the first knock, and didn’t
say, “Come back next week, I don’t have any money.”
I had a few of these customers, enough to affect my income
a little and my equilibrium a lot. Because the next week when they asked what
they owed, I’d reply, “One week, 42 cents.” I was too afraid to ask for two
weeks’ pay. Or more probably, I’d just skip collecting there the next week. The
best solution (and the weasel -iest) was to pay my younger sister Nancy to
collect for me.)
The trauma of collecting from overdue customers left me
with “collecting dreams” for decades. Several of my brothers recently told me
that they too had the same problem with some of their customers - they
wouldn’t always collect from them either. And they had the same type of dreams.
Even so, I still feel that I was a wimp back then. But hey, that was back then.
These days I don’t feel like a wimp, very often.
--Bob 
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