The dangers of the paper route

Does anybody else feel like the boomers would still be buying newspapers and getting them delivered if the product wasn't actually 70 percent worse than what the consumer used to get in a daily? There still are enough boomers alive to support the industry had the product not become totally worthless.

 

The hook shot was a better idea anyway.

 

One winter in northern Manitoba I had a job helping the newspaper distribution manager hand out the Winnipeg daily paper to the delivery boys. The papers would arrive a day late by train and if it was on time, it would get to the station about 6 a.m. The paper boys would deliver before they went to school. Just remember that some mornings it would be 40 below zero so it wasn't a fun job.

 

This thread brought back this memory that I hadn't thought about in forever.

When I was growing up, we had a PM paper that was eventually delivered by a number of kids on our street. It was almost a rite of passage --- you turned 12 and you were eligible to deliver the paper. The one boy gave it to his brother, who gave it to a boy two doors down, who gave it to me, and I later gave it to the boy next door. It paid good money --- I mean, at that age, any money was good money --- and the routine was basically come home, pick up the stack of papers that waited at the curb, grab your bike and a friend or two and take them for delivery.

Well, as it turned out, we had the resident wacko on our street, and of course he was a subscriber. He had gotten in some trouble with the tax authorities at one point and had all these signs all over the front of his house protesting the corrupt government.

I was rather ignorant of a lot of this stuff, being 12 and all, and I later learned that there was a day he was told the police would be there in force to evict him from the home. That day, I rode up and he had the house and property barricaded. His pickup truck blocked the driveway between the fences and he was sitting up on his deck, above the front door, facing the police, with something resembling a rifle on his lap.

My task was to deliver the paper, and as I rode up on my bike with two or three friends, I wanted to make sure he got it. I hopped off my bike, jumped over the fence and started walking toward the front door. (You'd think this would be dangerous, but the delivery bag with all the papers was neon yellow. He could see it was me.)

As I got to the front door, I dropped the paper, then got spooked and started to walk briskly away. That's when the man called down to me from his deck. I turned around and he stood up, then dropped a $20 bill down to me and said thank you.

I picked it up and, again, hurried out of there. It was great having the $20, basically a week's pay, but even better to have friends tell everyone at school the next day that I walked through the police line to deliver the crazy guy with the rifle his paper.

 

In Little League, our freaking first baseman had to leave practice early because of his paper route.

 

Ain't scared