Being a Paperboy

Being a paperboy wasn't just about the regular income it provided.  During Christmas I had this little thing I would do. I would go and buy a couple boxes of Christmas cards and fill them all out. Then some early evening I would go around and ring each doorbell or knock on each door to deliver them personally. I wouldn't just leave them if nobody answered. I wanted to deliver them face-to-face in hopes I might get a tip. In lots of cases it worked. The typical exchange would just be me identifying myself, something like this:
  "Hello, I'm Rick, your News Tribune paperboy, and I just wanted to wish you a merry Christmas."
In many cases I would get something like, "Oh that's so sweet! Just a minute..." and they would disappear inside and come back with money. I made out pretty good during that annual ritual. There were a few customers that gave me something special regardless, like one customer that gave me a 3-pound box of Russell Stover chocolates every year.

Collecting was something that I had to do monthly and I didn't care for it. It would have been fine if everyone would have paid me the first time out, but there were always people that weren't home or didn't have the money the night I stopped by. I did like getting out and about actually doing it though because it was always after dinner instead of the afternoon time when I delivered their papers, and I could do it at my speed.  One evening when I was out collecting I cut between a couple of houses to jump over to the next street instead of going all the way to the end of the block.  In doing so I got a unexpected bonus. There, in a brightly-lit bedroom window facing the driveway, was a girl standing naked! Of course I stopped and gazed, totally flabbergasted at what I was seeing. No curtains drawn and only a couple of feet from the window, she was apparently trying on a bunch of nighties or something, because she kept at it for several minutes. What I really found interesting was when I noticed that I knew her. She was one year older than me and played clarinet in band class. Well, as you might imagine, I never looked at her quite the same after that night!

Sunday mornings were vastly different than any other delivery day. First of all, it was an early morning delivery. All the other days of the week were afternoon deliveries. That meant I had to actually set an alarm and get up in the wee hours. Secondly, the papers on Sunday were huge. They arrived at my little delivery stand in the alley (a small, wooden open-front structure provided by the paper company) at some time during the wee hours of the morning in multiple bundles. There was the main news portion, and in addition was the bundles of ad circulars (or "inserts" as we paperboys called them) and I had to marry them all together into one fat paper. Sundays were sufficiently oversized enough that I couldn't fit them all in my carrier bag like I could on other days. That prompted me to buy a cart to put them all in, and I would anchor that to my bicycle and pull it behind me like a trailer.

Sunday morning deliveries meant I was out in pretty cold conditions some days. I remember one time on a particularly cold winter morning warming my hands up under the stream of warm air coming out of a laundromat exhaust. Sunday mornings also gave me time to do things I shouldn't do. After my papers were all delivered I would sometimes roam the town looking for something interesting. That usually meant doing something I shouldn't be doing or going somewhere I shouldn't be going. The city was practically closed on a Sunday morning. No cars to speak of, and no people or activity anywhere. I remember browsing through stuff in front of our local grocery store on a few of those mornings. Apparently, a lot of things were routinely left outside each night. Maybe they just didn't have room or things were too heavy or whatever. Bins full of heavy things like pumpkins, presto logs, or things like that. I remember one morning finding a bunch of Raid Yard Guard bug spray left out, ripe for the picking. I found out that they had some sort of high-powered spray that shot out for quite a distance, and I ended up grabbing one or two of them and riding around shooting stuff with it. I was in borderline juvenile delinquent mode I guess. I found one cafe on the west end of Main Street that was open on Sunday mornings and I would stop by there and play their coin-operated games from time to time. That was my first experience with a pinball machine. They also had a cool helicopter game that you could fly around inside of a glass case. It was mounted on an axle and it flew in circles while you were controlling the movement with two joysticks, hitting pegs for points as you went around and around.

Those were fun times. I was operating solo and enjoying it--nobody following me, watching me, or monitoring my actions. In most cases I was back home before anyone even got out of bed.