It's time for another edition of Remember When? Thanks to everyone for the feedback on the last few columns. Many of you mentioned that my description of Mrs. McWilliams was "dead on." This time around, Remember When? is going to be about some headline news... literally, and retroactively, of course—let's go! 

It's the early '80s, and I want to make you about 11 to 14 years old, and you are... a paperboy!

By the decade of the Yuppie, paperboys (or girls, at least somewhere) were far, far removed from their historical cinematic representations. They were no longer found on every urban street corner, with earth-tone clothing and Buster Brown derby hats shouting "read all about it!" or saying "mista, do you want a papeh?"

Suburban sprawl spread things out. Folks out here would get their paper from 7-Eleven or the many convenience stores uptown in Caldwell (trivia: at the time, there were not a lot of places to buy your paper in West Caldwell or to get a cup of coffee to go).

Personal computing was in its infancy, and although many were talking about receiving and reading your news on them, it would be decades until we had The Caldwells Patch. That left one other option: getting your newspaper delivered. 

It's still around, but print newspaper delivery today is a different animal. Someone loads up their car once, maybe twice, and delivers to a whole town. For example, there's a guy in what must be an '82 Toyota Celica who zooms down my block and tosses a paper toward my house. I never signed up, but there he is ever so often, landing a plastic bagged paper on my driveway, lawn or landscaping. 

Back in the day, the people with cars were sort of middlemen, who employed and entrusted young kids to carry out the job of newspaper delivery—literally. They would drop off a few heavy bundles of them in a driveway, and kids would do the rest.

Kids. Think about it: there was a time when pre-teens and teens were the final link in a chain of delivering all the news that was fit to print right to your door. How quaint! 

A Delivery Mercenary

Here's a confession: I never actually officially signed on to deliver the Star-Ledger. A few of my buddies did, and I'd get in on the action by helping out. My services were steep—it would come at half of the route, and thusly, income. I was like the A-Team of delivery boys, more Face than Mr. T.

At the time, having a paper route still had a certain cachet, somewhat akin to being a policeman or school teacher, or at least a Boy Scout. It was a humble, noble pursuit. I distinctly remember my old man being impressed that I was delivering newspapers, so much that he took a break from making fun of the music I liked. 

The actual work was kind of fun, but getting up was brutal. Even then, I wasn't a morning person. By the way, I'm not a night owl either, but rather a 10 a.m. to midnight kind of person—you know, normal.

My main route was initially somewhere in my three-block neighborhood. Chaz Rapa (or later, Brian McCarthy) would cover Whitaker Place and Pinetree Place; leaving me Lombard Drive, or vice-versa.

It was a decent, nearly down-the-middle split that worked well, barring the fact that whoever had Lombard had more physical ground to cover while hauling the headlines before beginning to deposit them. Each half-route amounted to about 30 subscribing houses each. The others must have read that awful New York Post or something.

It was an easy job, barring heeding the alarm clock, with little learning curve and no equipment. I think that the Star-Ledger did provide a paper-carrying sack of some kind, but it quickly fell into disuse. The weekdays and weekends were markedly different.

During the week, it was a solo outing, very quiet and a pensive time. I'd get up, go and grab my pile of papers and hit the bricks. I learned even more about my neighborhood and the people who lived in it. I learned every shortcut, and who would get mad if I crossed their lawn.

I even learned about ink—many times, some of it would be on my shirt, pants, and even right leg, if it were warm weather. My mother would repeatedly castigate me for coming home wearing headlines.

More than anything, I learned to appreciate newspapers. By the time I started delivering papers, I had already become a fairly voracious reader, but now I was perusing world news, sports, and of course, the leisure section. 

I followed the entire lifespan of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative. I memorized the standings of every single team in the American and National baseball leagues. I must have read "The Family Circus," "Ziggy" and "Hagar the Horrible" comics every single day for three years straight. I also became formidable at Cryptoquotes. I knew the prime television schedule for every network. It was that last fact, and the viewing it spawned, that had me scared on the next morning's run.

The Day After—Literally and Televisually

"The Day After" was a much-hyped made-for-TV movie that was given a lot of coverage not only in the Ledger, but everywhere before and after its initial airing on November 20, 1983.

It was the story of a town trying to regroup and survive after a nuclear war. It was gritty, jarring and pretty real. The morning after "The Day After" was a weird one on the paper route. I couldn't sleep after watching the movie; I kept having nightmares about it and woke up early.

It was the spookiest thing to deliver the paper moments after the sun came up—it was a weird day, too. The whole time I delivered was like an extended twilight, with the sun breaking through the clouds in spots, illuminating some houses while leaving others in the dark.

I started thinking, "is this what it would be like the day after? Is this like a nuclear winter? How could a movie with Steve Guttenberg do this to me?" Needless to say, I took a big part in the discussion of the movie the next day at school.

The Financial Section

I'd collect payment from the customers on Sundays. Sometimes, folks would leave payment in envelopes we would provide. Most of the time (especially if we failed to provide them), we'd ring the doorbell and say, "collecting." Then, we'd hang out while the folks fished through their jackets or purses. Sometimes they'd invite us inside. This was how not only the Star-Ledger got paid, but how we did; our compensation was solely from tips.

If a customer enjoyed a full seven days of newspaper delivery, they'd owe $1.25. Most would pay anywhere from a buck fifty to $2. If they just subscribed for Sunday delivery, they'd owe 35 cents, which many would round up to 50 cents. Occasionally, they'd make it a buck. The math became heavy duty if someone wasn't home for a couple of weeks or more; I'd go on memory. At the end of it all, I'd pocket about 10 to 15 bucks.

The Early Edition Becomes The Late Edition

Our tips were ostensibly for good service, but really because we were kids from the neighborhood. Admittedly, at first my service wasn't the best of the best.

Time was a factor—on weekdays, I'd be getting up really early, delivering, getting ready for and going to school. For the customer, that at least meant an early delivery during the week. Unfortunately, it also meant a messy one. Since I was trying to beat the clock, sometimes I wouldn't put the paper under everyone's door mat.

If the customer had already left for the day to do their toil, odds were good that they would be coming home to the classifieds section on the lawn, sports in a bush and maybe one section on their doorstep.

Weekends were another story; Saturday papers hit the doorsteps as late as 9 in the morning, and Sunday papers were sometime before 11.

As you may know, Sunday papers are the mothers of all newspapers, big, fat and much heavier. What you may not know is that a good third of the paper—the parts that weren't "hard" news or sports—were dropped off the night before. Come Sunday morning, the main section and the rest of it would arrive, and the whole thing would have to be assembled.

That process took a while, and when you factor in sleeping in and talking (hanging out), it was either a very late morning edition or very early afternoon one. After a while, some folks in the neighborhood would come by and pick up their own paper while we were putting them together!

As a side note, I was pretty lucky on the animal front. There weren't any mean dogs on any of my routes—ever!

Free Chocolate in The Comics

If some market research by the Hershey Foods company reveals that no one except one person who lived on Whitaker Place, Pinetree Place or Lombard Drive in the mid-1980s likes Kit Kat bars, I might be to blame.

Around 1984, there were coupons in the Sunday section for a free Kit Kat bar. Yes, packed in the comics section with other offers for 20 cents of off Cling-Free and the like were "no purchase necessary" golden tickets of sorts for free full-size Kit Kat bars. I went through all of the papers, taking the whole page out, coupon and all. I had Kit Kits bars for a long time afterward. The only catch was I had to go to different stores—some merchants wouldn't take them the fifth time around.

Transfer!

Late in the game, I went to work across the brook in my backyard with another pal, Sam Lin. Sam had taken the cue of the Whitaker boys and scored the route on his street, Knoll Terrace. For a while, we did the "split block" system that I pioneered, and he eventually even employed his little brother and sister to help out with the Sunday assembly.

For this Remember When? I contacted Sam and he sent along some of his memories about delivering papers, which started with a salient point that I somehow neglected to mention: Newspaper delivery was a 365-day-a-year job. That's more than the Postal Service and banks. There we were, in all kinds of weather, all the time.

Here are some more of his recollections—many serve to illustrate some of the hardships of being a newspaper delivery kid, and show that we were nuts.

"What better way to know your neighbors than to go to their house everyday? Albeit most of them ended up being known by nicknames, like 'Morris' (because they had a cat that looked like Morris the Nine Lives advertising cat), 'red house' (since it was red) and 'doctor' (the home had a shingle out front).  

When it rained, we had to open everyone's screen door and drop the paper between the screen and the door. Then you would get complaints from the same guys that would tip you only 10 cents per week because their paper got wet. Or, they would withhold their tip since you did such a lousy job that week! 

For some reason back then people expected to have their papers on their doorsteps. It wasn't like the movies and TV shows where you see the paper boy riding a bike and flinging the paper on the driveway. 

I recall that one time for some reason we had a lot of papers left over. The brook was dry, and we decided to cover the brook—that was part of your backyard—in paper. Then we got caught and had to clean it up."

I had forgotten about the brook incident—my father was the one who took us to task for making the brook look like the bottom of a bird cage.

The customers on Knoll Terrace were more demanding than on Whitaker, etc.—the adults over there had long given up on us!

I remember garbage-picking with Sam on his route—he and I were kind of pack rats, grabbing refrigerator boxes, etc. and putting them in his basement. One time, someone threw out a giant Lender's bagels store display sign. Animated guys (presumably the Lenders brothers) were on it, among bagels smothered with grape jelly, saying "Lender's and Welch—who elch?" I loved it, but my mother did not; it went over to Sam's house, and where it met the same fate via his mother.

The End of An Era

My time was certainly memorable, educational, profitable and it helped make me more responsible and independent. I'm glad I had the chance; In another couple of years, home delivery moved away from young kids doing it to adults. Some little brothers in the neighborhood helped older ones in preparation for doing their routes, but the "on-foot" delivery method and the coolness, was gone forever.

Related Links

The Day After Wikipedia page. Hey, it's on DVD! I might have to spook myself out all over again!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

Here's a 1981 News Report About Someday Reading The Newspaper on The Internet! Do you think it will happen?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tymKPTTjrSw

Who else had a paper route? Send in your memories!