Paperboy (Jobs of My Youth #1)
One of my favorite jobs from the early 1980s - apprentice printer at Coffee House Press. Me on the left getting ready to ink the clamshell platen press, Allan Kornblum on the right running the ATF Little Giant flatbed cylinder press.
A week ago, my neighbor Loren stopped by to ask if I could lend him and his cousin Quentin a hand with pouring a backyard patio slab. I said I’d be glad to. So, early Monday morning, as a concrete mixer chugged up our quiet side street, I finished my bowl of granola and hustled over to his house. I was the youngest guy on our crew, so I wheelbarrowed the concrete from the mixer on the street to the slab form behind the house. Loren pointed where to drop each load as they adjusted the rebar and leveled the surface with a two-by-four screed. The work brought back memories of my days as a hod carrier for a brick crew in Butler County, Kentucky, and other honest labor I’ve performed for hire. I began to write about jobs I’ve held, hoping for more than a pleasant swim through nostalgia, hoping to get at what the work taught me.
In 1964, at the age of ten, I landed my first job. My friend Mike Keller had signed up for an Akron Beacon Journal paper route and asked if I’d like to help him. He had ninety customers, so it would’ve been a challenge for one kid, especially on Wednesdays. Loaded with advertising inserts, the Wednesday paper was so big I could barely fit thirty in my canvas bag, carrying the last fifteen in a precarious stack atop them. I’d put the strap of the paper bag on my head and lug the load that way, leaning forward a bit as I walked, reaching under my left arm to pull out a paper when I got to a house. Except for Sunday’s six a.m. edition, it was an afternoon paper. After school, I’d pick up my papers at a pallet near Kent Road, where the bundles for four other routes would be dropped off. Across the street, a drugstore with a soda fountain was our refuge if the Beacon Journal truck was late. We’d sip vanilla or cherry phosphates while keeping an eye out for the truck from our swivel seats.
Before long, Mike and I lucked out when a condominium apartment complex, Silver Lake Towers, was built within the boundaries of our route, doubling the number of customers. Mike decided to divide the route in two. No surprise, he took the condominiums, leaving me the rest – a few apartments on Kent Road, then Sycamore Drive, Gorge Park Boulevard past the cemetery, Patty Ann Drive, Lake Road, and up and down Englewood Drive. I was able to arrange the route so I finished just a few minutes from home. I got used to the routine of delivering the news, rain or shine, in the snow of winter and the heat of summer.
On days when the edition was smaller and the weather was favorable, I developed the skill of folding the newspaper – holding the paper so the fold pointed up, slipping my index finger into the center of the left edge of the paper, folding over the first two inches of the right side of the paper, folding that again, then tucking the folded right half of the paper into the center of its left edge. I could fling a properly folded paper twenty feet without it opening in mid-flight, and land it softly on the porch, right at the front door.
A few customers took care of their bill through the office, but most paid me. Some paid four or five weeks at a time, but more paid me weekly. I’d collect on Saturday mornings, knocking on doors, getting to know my customers – the Greenwalds, Domingos, Wynns, Huscrofts, Mariolas, Cardones, Rubels. During most of my paperboy career, from 1964 to the fall of 1969, the cost for a weekly subscription was sixty cents. Folks would hand me a dollar, and I’d reach down to the coin dispenser hooked to my belt – ching, ching, ching, quarter, nickel, dime – and hand them their change. I’d stop halfway at Isaly’s, a diner and ice cream shop on Kent Road, to sit in a booth and treat myself to lunch while I updated my books. I was a bona fide businessperson.
I paid my bill once a month. The district manager would meet up with the paperboys in the basement of a church on Graham Road. We paid him in cash. What was left over was profit, and I was able to save enough to pay my tuition at Walsh Jesuit High School.[1] For the most part, I liked my customers, and they liked me. One customer on Gorge Park, Mr. Taylor, ran a ceramics studio out of his basement and began to hire me to do odd jobs. Besides clay mixers and kilns, his basement was filled with endless shelves of ceramic molds. People would take classes there, learning to paint, glaze, and fire sugar bowls, coffee mugs, vases, statues of cats with long eyelashes, all manner of dust-collecting bric-a-brac. When I handed down my route to my brothers Joe and Tom, I started working for him regularly, raking endless piles of leaves in the fall, sweeping out his studio, unloading pottery molds and large bricks of earthenware clay, loading boxes of ceramic pottery into customers’ cars.
By this time, I had also started caddying (or as we called it, looping) at Silver Lake Country Club. The country club was only a mile and a half from my house but a far greater distance by income bracket. I looped for lawyers and doctors and investment bankers – the upper crust. You wanted to caddy for golfers who hit the ball long and straight, who actually enjoyed their time on the golf course, who didn’t drink during their round or throw their putter at you when they missed a tap-in, who tipped well – that was a rare combination. I sometimes crept onto the course late at night and swam around in the water hazards, salvaging the expensive Titleists the duffers I’d caddied for, whose hubris lent them an unreasonably high regard for their golfing prowess, had deposited there.
The caddy shack was another milieu entirely. Most of the loopers were older than me – guys in their twenties who would loop a double (carry two bags) before lunch and then take another eighteen-hole loop in the heat of the afternoon. I tried to steer clear of these guys – they viewed younger kids like me as fresh meat – and never joined their card games, where a day’s wages could be lost in the blink of an eye. One reason I caddied was that it gave me the privilege of playing the course for free on Mondays, when it was closed to the public. But more importantly, looping at the country club allowed me to appraise the world hidden behind the facade of those expensive homes and expansive lawns I biked past on my way to Silver Lake to go fishing.
Overall, I grew to appreciate the rhythms of working, the discipline it required, the camaraderie it offered. I wore with honor the newsprint ink that covered my hands after delivering papers, agreeing with Van Morrison’s sentiments about work: “What’s my line? I’m happy cleaning windows.”
Footnote:
[1] I was a “scholarship boy” my first year. (Entering its fourth year of operation, the school freely distributed scholarships to recruit students.) The tuition the next year was $350, increasing to $700 by my senior year.