I can’t remember exactly when I first started delivering the Evening Herald, but I believe it was sometime around 1977 (just before I started the seventh grade). And I can’t really remember why I thought I wanted a paper route, but I suspect the reason was simple avarice. For several years, that same route had belonged to my sister; it seemed to me — having observed from a distance — that it wasn’t a whole lot of work, and the idea of having my own income was an attractive one. So when Barbara decided to retire, I volunteered to take over, and a dynasty was born.
For the next six years, the paper route was a part of my life, and an albatross around my neck. In absolute terms, I was right that it wasn’t a lot of work: the Heathwood neighborhood was relatively small, with only about a hundred customers, and on most days I could fold and deliver all of the papers within ninety minutes or so. But it soon began to seem like a major pain. When I got home from school at 4:00 in the afternoon, generally all I wanted to do was watch TV, and the bundle of newspapers waiting for me on the back steps was not a particularly welcome sight.
Some days were worse than others, of course. Mondays and Fridays were generally the best, because the paper on those days was incredibly skinny. On those days the paper generally consisted of only a single section with no advertising inserts, and I could fold each paper into a tight, almost pencil-thin roll; even the entire batch of papers didn’t fill my canvas bag. Since the papers were easy to fold and the route took only one trip, if I was fast I could get the whole thing done in under an hour.
Wednesdays, on the other hand, were hell. On Wednesdays the Herald was a monster, with multiple sections, coupons, and voluminous sales inserts. Simply folding the Wednesday paper was sometimes difficult, and my fingers were stung by many popped rubber bands. There was no question of loading all of the Wednesday papers into my canvas bag; no, on Wednesdays the route took two or even three trips. God, I hated Wednesdays. (The only thing worse than Wednesday was Thanksgiving Day, when each paper weighed approximately forty pounds — but that came only once a year.)
Over the years I came to despise “the route” (as it was universally referred to in our house), and I wasn’t the only one. Even though it was technically my responsibility, it ended up dragging everyone else in at some point or another. If the papers were particularly huge, I’d often enlist the help of my parents to get them folded; if I was running late, or if it was raining, I’d persuade one of them to take me on the route in the car.
But as much as I disliked the route, I could never bring myself to consider quitting; the money was too good. Giving up $100 a month and returning to allowance money would have been inconceivable. And so I struggled along, cursing my obligations every day (except Sunday), annoying my friends by not being available after school, and occasionally attracting the attention of the national news media.
I actually did get pretty good at certain aspects of the route. I got very fast and very efficient at folding papers, and on days other than Wednesday I could generally get the whole bundle of papers folded with remarkable rapidity. I was particularly proud of my rubber-band technique; once I had the paper folded into a cylindrical shape, I could snatch a rubber band from the pile and loop it twice around the paper in what was almost a single movement of my hand. (And I did all this without really looking; there was a small black-and-white TV on the workbench where I folded the papers, so I was usually watching The Flintstones or Gilligan’s Island as I worked.)
But I was never a particularly good businessman. Once a month I billed my customers by inserting a self-addressed envelope into each paper; most of them paid without trouble, either by mail or by putting the envelope in our mailbox. But there were a few customers who insisted that I had to collect their payments in person, and I could rarely be bothered to do this on a monthly basis. When I finally did manage to drag myself around to their houses, some of them were unhappy about being asked to cough up several months’ worth of payments at once. Some customers proved difficult to catch up with, and my own lack of diligence in this regard didn’t help. Mrs. Branyon never did pay me for about six months, but I long ago decided to let it go.
Other customers were more particular in other ways. Most were happy to have their papers tossed in the front yard, and in fact I developed quite a good arm (although there was one occasion when I actually managed to get a paper stuck in a tree). Some, however, wanted their papers stuck in their Charlotte Observer paper boxes. And then, of course, I had to keep up with requests to stop delivery during vacations, which also meant calculating a reduced monthly rate for those customers who missed some days.
In general, though, I managed to keep most of my customers happy. One notable exception was a lady who became positively irate about some error I’d made (I no longer remember the details, but I think I may have accidentally delivered her paper while she was on vacation). She complained to me and to my parents, and eventually went to the circulation department at the Herald and (I guess) threatened to cancel her subscription. So intractable was her fury with me that the head of circulation decided to remove her house from my route: thereafter, that one house in our neighborhood was served by a different carrier. (Fortunately, one was available: Christopher Morgan, who lived in our neighborhood but delivered papers elsewhere, was able to make a quick detour with little trouble.)
But the most memorable complaint I ever got from a customer is one I still cannot quite account for. One day as I was delivering papers, I encountered one of my customers as I was wheeling my bike around Hanover Court. He gestured across the cul-de-sac at another house and said “I don’t know if you heard, but the lady who lived there passed away.” It was the house of another of my customers, whose name I no longer recall; I rode by and sure enough, there were mournful flowers on the porch and a black ribbon or something like that on the mailbox. I decided that the thoughtful thing to do would be to go ahead and stop the paper, since surely the family of the old lady who’d lived there had enough things to worry about. I rode on by without delivering a paper.
An hour or so later I was sitting at the dinner table with the rest of the family when the phone rang. My dad answered it and handed the phone to me. It was the dead lady, asking why she had not gotten her paper that day. I had enough presence of mind not to respond “I thought you were dead!”; instead, I managed to apologize to her and promised to bring her paper right away. I immediately grabbed the leftover paper, hopped on my bike, and sped to her house, and when I got there it seemed clear that if she had been dead, she wasn’t anymore.
At any rate, my career in the newspaper business finally ended in early 1983. I was getting ready to go to college and needed to start putting some real money in the bank, so I’d followed in my sister’s footsteps once again and had gotten a job at Carowinds that was due to start a couple of months later. And so it was with very little regret that on January 29, 1983 — twenty years ago today — I hung up my canvas bag, parked my bike, washed the ink from my hands, and never looked back.
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