In my hometown, having a paper route as a little kid was kind of a rite of passage. Best job I could have had as a little kid (except for the one house with the unchained husky they kept outside).
I delivered the Stars and Stripes when I was overseas, and when I came back to the USA, I delivered the Washington Post for a few years.
When I lived in Japan, I had a job assembling and packing the Stars and Stripes at a central area, and a few boxes I had to fill, but no house to house. My older brother delivered the papers to the base hospital, which was a major outlet for soldiers wounded in Vietnam before they returned to the states. He interacted with the wounded soldiers there a bit, and I think it affected him some, as he still mentions it to this day.
When I came back to the states, we lived in Maryland, but I used to go to visit a friend who was my best friend before we went overseas, and he had a major paper route in a suburban area of Washington DC (Fairfax). That was my intro to REAL paper delivery-his father and two brothers were also involved, and delivery involved assembling the papers (for the Sunday edition) and loading them into their station wagon-it was completely filled. It was a family affair.
It took a couple of hours and a few trips IIRC to complete the deliveries beginning around 0400. We would go out and the driveway would have piles and piles of bundled papers stacked there. We unbundled them and loaded them into the car until it was full, then we each put on a canvas “newspaper bag” slung over our shoulders that we filled with the papers as much as we could. His father would drive just below walking speed through the sleeping neighborhoods, only an occasional yellow light on in some house as we passed slowly in and out of the cones of street lights.
We would walk behind the car loading papers from the open gate into our bag, then trot up the lawns to place the papers...PLACE THE PAPERS! right on the doormat that every house had. (This was one of the biggest suburbs in the country, I think)
Then. when our bag was empty, we would trot back to the car, fill our bags again, then trot to and from the houses delivering the papers. It was a major undertaking on Sunday, Saturday and other days were just irritating, but...we liked the small amount of spending money.
His dad would then take us out to have breakfast afterwards, which was great...what young teenage boy doesn’t like getting a stack of pancakes and syrup with link sausage in a restaurant?
So I got my own route on the base. That was a real pain. I remember having to “Assemble” the Sunday paper, and it was at least 3 inches thick. It was insanely heavy and I could only carry about ten of them at a time on my bike. Fortunately, I had a small route on a small naval communication station. I probably had 50-100 papers, and part of that was filling up the paper boxes and collecting the money from them.
Fortunately and unfortunately, I learned about the value of money as a measure of the work you do. I have never, in my whole life, been a morning person, but getting up at 5 AM on a routine basis, every day, having to cover the route somehow when I went on a Boy Scout camping thing or something and couldn’t be there, well...that sure did prepare me for life.
But the money was another thing. My last stop was filling up the paper box at the base administration building where my father was the XO of the base. This was my first real exposure to vending machines, and they had two of them: a candy machine, and a a machine that vended small cans of hot food like Hormel chili and lasagna. I had a fondness for Hershey bars, especially a new variety of bar called the “Special Dark”. It had a different taste and texture than the standard Hershey bar. and the bottom of the wrapper had a band of unusual red that dissolved into the dark of the upper part. “Special Dark”...I remember it was new, and I loved it. I also learned to like canned chili and lasagna. As a result, when I pulled the money out of that paper box, I put a portion of it directly into those vending machines. As most people who raise boys know, their appetites as they grow can be ferocious, and we had four boys and two girls, my parents even had to put a lock on our kitchen for a few years to keep our marauding family away from the food. So, when I had my own money to buy my own food...I did.
As a result, I learned that earning money is also tied to saving money, and having one without the other means you often have little or no money.
I remember those paper boy days, though. Even today, driving down the road to work early, and seeing a yellow light on in a suburban house brings me back, and I remember those weekends I got to spend with my best friend after we came back to the states.
But it also brings sadness, even today.
I felt so sad for that family.
When I knew them before we went overseas, their son was my first real best friend, and they had four boys, a real All American family. They were also my parents close friends, and they socialized quite a bit. Then tragedy struck...their youngest son, a two year old, found his way into the pool at their house and drowned. It was a dark day, I remember well the darkness and sadness that descended on both of our houses. Everyone spoke in hushed tones for a while, and even all these years later, just hearing the name of their son is enough to bring me back to that time. His mother was never the same, and when I saw them again some five or six years later, even though she tried to put on a good show for my sake, to a 13 year old boy, it was evident she was struggling to hold things together. Their father, a marvelous, kind, hardworking, dedicated father and fine husband, held that family together with chewing gum and baling wire as he lost his job, his wife deteriorated, and their marriage fell apart. She never recovered fully from the loss of her son, and last I had heard she had a full nervous breakdown. I can remember my parents discussing it in low tones and looking at me nervously when I walked into the room.