My entry into the labor force occurred at age twelve, when I asked my mother if I could get a paper route, delivering the Oregonian.  (The Journal, the afternoon paper at the time, didn’t pay as well, so I wanted to go straight to the big leagues….)  While she eagerly praised my enterprising spirit, she fretted that it might be dangerous for a kid to be out in the predawn darkness each day.  ”You can if you do it with your brother,” she decided, in about fifteen seconds.  I quickly consulted the brother in question, just shy of a year my junior, and, seeing visions of expensive toys dancing in his head, he agreed.  To our surprise (at the time) we were immediately hired, and given a route about five blocks away, where we would deliver about eighty papers in a two by six block area, for the princely sum of $80 per month.  But just like in those get rich quick commercials, the actual work to be performed was deliberately left rather nebulous.  Our first clue that this might be more work than we thought was the subscriber list; it seemed every fourth customer expected the paper to be deposited in some special place; inside a screen door, down the driveway, behind a gate, whatever.  Who new that five bucks a month bought such service?  Walking through the area, we noticed that because it bordered a park, several of the streets were dead ends, requiring lots of redundant travel, and there was no way to do it in a neat circle because the route was so narrow and long.  Oh, well, we’d figure it out.  We were almost excited when we set our alarm clock, envisioning the money rolling in.

When that alarm blared in what seemed like the middle of the night, cold reality hit us in our bleary-eyed faces at 4:30 am in the form of a towering mountain  of newsprint on our porch.  The pitiful bags they gave us could never carry them all, because in those days, the papers were so large that even on Mondays eighty of them was a four-foot stack.  Worse, not only had we forgotten most of what we’d learned in our daylight reconnaissance mission casing the route, but by the time we’d delivered all the papers, making multiple trips, it was getting close to 6:30, when customers were officially allowed to start complaining.  And complain they did.  Surly old geezers and curlered harridans lay in wait to angrily berate us by the end of the route, so we vowed to make some logistic changes, including stealing a grocery cart, for day two.  Things went more smoothly after that.  Soon, we could do the whole route in about 45 minutes, after twenty minutes or so of folding and rubber-banding, (which we did sparingly because we had to pay for the rubber bands…) and the only complaints we got from then on were from deliberate “mistakes” to customers we thought deserved them.  ”Paper on roof,” etc.  We also discovered that the panels at the bottom of those aluminum screen doors so popular in the 70′s would make such a deliciously resounding boom when hit just right that I think we had to pay for one or two that we popped out, but otherwise, we were generally beloved by customers and boss, and went on to build up to a veritable empire of two routes that surrounded our house, cutting down on travel.

For three years, we dragged our blackened “paper route clothes” out of the bottom drawers, pulled them on, and trudged out in the (most often) rain, sharing the wonders of the Free Press with our neighbors, while our loyal dog stayed in the general area, chasing cats and eating garbage, unless it was too rainy, and then he’d go back home and bark to be let in, to the considerable chagrin of the neighbors and my mother.  We soon had a fleet of grocery carts for our endeavor; different sizes for different days, one crudely outfitted by me with bent oil pan in place of the wheels, which cruised through the snow nicely.  Still, as the years wore on, I counted down the days until I could get a work permit at 15, so I could get a fancy job, perhaps bussing tables, especially when Christmas morning to us meant three six-foot stacks of papers and a cheap box of mints, which we were apparently supposed to share, and presents afterward when everyone else got up.

The best thing about the paper route, in retrospect, and the reason why I would recommend one for every kid, was that it put future work in perspective; even the crappiest job would seem glamorous and well-paid after that.  That, and you even get a day off every once in a while.

Happy Labor Day….