Demise of the paperboy

I was reading the Hattiesburg American tonight when I remembered one of the biggest signs that the world has changed from my childhood.

When I was a child, paperboys were so common that:

• Atari created a fun and popular video game whose protagonist was, well, a paperboy;
• a popular comedy featured a paperboy whose one line in the entire movie—including when his bike went flying off a mountain cliff—was, "I want my two dollars!"

I was a paperboy myself. I delivered the Daily Press, the morning newspaper in our city. We had an afternoon paper, too, the Times Herald, but the Daily Press had bought the company some time before, so it played second fiddle. Like most such papers, it soon vanished.

I loved that job, and I still remember it fondly. My alarm would sound at 4·30am, and by 5·30 I was usually out at the drop site, reading one of the newspapers. I usually had a couple of extra newspapers, and I loved reading first the headlines, and then the funnies.

That time of day is beautiful in eastern Virginia, especially during the summer. The mornings are cool, the sun has yet to rise, and the streets are silent. Only an occasional car breaks the sound of the crickets and the wind in your ears. I would ride my bicycle silently down the road or the sidewalk, passing under streetlamps and beautiful old oak trees and pine trees and others, and fling the newspaper towards the main door. I got to be quite good at aiming it, and landing it on the doorstep. Most of my customers liked me a great deal; some even said that I was the best paperboy they'd ever had. You can imagine how that made me feel.

Delivering papers every morning was the best part. It made up for every other aspect to the job, which was terrible.

First, the Daily Press at that time had a bad unit at the end of their printing press. I don't know what it was, only what the truck driver told me. That thing was so antiquated and decrepit that they couldn't get it to work half the time, and for some reason they refused to replace it. So, while the newspapers were supposed to arrive at the drop point around 4.30 every morning, and I was supposed to finish before 6, on many occasions I'd still be waiting for my papers at 6.30, growing increasingly nervous that I'd miss the bus. (Often I did, and my parents had to give me a ride to school.)

Second, the district managers—the adults charged with overseeing us, collecting our money, and providing us with supplies—changed with a rather high frequency. In three years, I had four different managers. It was hard enough to get them to buy supplies for us. Any common-sense approach would have the newspaper supply rubber bands and plastic bags to us each morning when the papers arrived. The cost of the supplies could be billed to the carrier in the same way that the newspapers were billed to the carrier.

Naturally, the Daily Press had no such system. Instead, it required us to request supplies in advance from our managers, then wait for them to bring the supplies to our homes, where we would pay for them. It was not uncommon to wait several weeks between requesting plastic bags and receiving them. I would inevitably run out of my stock, and then it would rain one day and I'd have to deliver unprotected newspapers. (Plastic grocery bags could have helped, but they were uncommon then, too.) Who would the customer blame for a wet paper? The manager, who couldn't secure the bags for me within a reasonable time frame? The newspaper, which was too stupid to supply bags with the newspapers on days when their own weather page predicted rain? Of course not: the paperboy got blamed. The high turnover of managers only worsened the problem.

Another bad aspect was delinquent customers. It was hard enough for me to walk up to a stranger's house, knock or ring the doorbell, wait a minute, or more, hoping that someone would be home this time, and only then (if I was lucky) ask them to pay for the newspapers I had faithfully delivered. It was even harder to have to hear, Can you come back later? I'm fresh out of cash, or, My wife handles the money, and she's not here, or, Today's Friday, and we're Jewish, so we can't pay you today. I'm pretty proud of the fact that I never failed to pay my manager for the newspapers, and I never asked my parents to cover for me, but it's pretty disgusting that many of my subscribers never fully held up their end of the bargain, and had no end of excuses to give me a hard time. There's no question that I never earned as much money as I should have; I just gave up on getting money out of some subscribers. This was a mistake of course; I had the authority to de-subscribe them, but I tried it once or twice, and the customers would re-subscribe, and the same nonsense would start all over again. I must have been lucky to deliver to one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Newport News; I can't imagine what it must have like been for kids in other neighborhoods.

Another problem was rising delinquency rates among paperboys in the area. The route I originally took with my brother had been more or less abandoned by the previous paperboy. (If you could trust the manager's story, which maybe you can't, considering the turnover rate.) My brother did well, but eventually lost interest, so I took on his portion of the route when he decided to quit. Another route was added to mine later, because that boy had gotten in trouble with the district manager for some reason that I never did understand. I was later asked to take on a third route. I tried it for a week, which was long enough to give the manager a breather, but it spread me far too thin, and kept me crossing Warwick Boulevard after the rush hour traffic began. In all these cases, the managers expressed their appreciation for my reliability, and their disappointment that most other paperboys weren't nearly as reliable.

My last manager was a neighbor of mine, and a decent fellow at that. He had been a paperboy himself, indeed he had been one of the best, with few complaints (maybe none) and some awards from the company. He was the one who told me that the Daily Press was switching to adult delivery on its routes as fast as it could, because children had become too unreliable. They would merge several routes with 50-100 deliveries (a typical route for a child) into one route with 400-500 deliveries, which would make it profitable for an adult who drove a car. They would also increase the carrier's share of the profits on such routes. If my memory doesn't fail me, he told me that most of the routes were already delivered by adults, and I was one of the last of the paperboys. I might even have been the last one he managed, although I don't believe I was the last one in the city of Newport News. If I was, I deserve some award for that. ;-)

At this point, I need to acknowledge my parents, who helped me sometimes. If it was bitterly cold, they would drive with me to the drop point to collect the papers, then take me home where I could fold and/or bag them in the living room. Sometimes, they would even drive me around my route. I probably wouldn't have had as good a record without their encouragement and support.

I finally quit while I was a junior in high school, mostly because I wanted more money for less work. A friend of mine who had also been a carrier had taken a job at Hardee's after being fired/quitting over a truly strange payment dispute with his district manager. He pointed out that I could work for several dollars an hour and earn more money with 8-10 hours' work a week than I did with 15 hours or more with the newspaper route. I follwed him some time later to the wonderful world of hamburgers and french fries, and the newspaper world went on to change.

A lot of it has changed for the better. The newspapers have got some sense into their heads, and bill the customers directly. The adults who deliver the papers from their cars don't have to deal with the nonsense I had to deal with from people who couldn't find their money, or couldn't pay because they were observing the Sabbath.

I wish we still had paperboys. I would like my children to have that experience, too. Maybe I can finagle it one day, by taking a route and dividing it among them, but if the world has changed in some ways, I wonder if it hasn't become inadvisable to try such a thing today.