My son Dean, out of nowhere, told us long ago at the dinner
table he wanted a paper route. He was
maybe 11. My kids amaze me. Just when I think I know them, they change.
“It’s a hard job Dean.
Why do you want to do it?”
“I want the money. And I think it will be fun.”
He envisioned himself riding his bike briskly down the middle
of the pavement, tossing papers skillfully, landing them perfectly on doorways
on either side of the street. It wasn’t
that easy. He found out it was easier to
walk his route, primarily made up of three dead end streets just north of our
house, toting a canvas bag stuffed with papers slung over his shoulder. Only rarely, in extreme temperature or stormy
weather, did his mother or I help him. Aside
from one hot afternoon when I observed him losing his cool at a stack of heavy
papers and angrily throwing the ad inserts in our garbage can, Dean was a
really good paper boy. He was dependable
and made friends with customers on his route, especially the old ladies. One
woman gave him a can of pop every day.
He cleaned up at Christmas with bonus money.
Dean was frugal with the money he earned. When he neared high school and quit his route
Dean bought a desktop computer better than the one we had at the time. I was proud of him. I still am.
He’s the staff accountant at a Chicago not for profit on the West Side that
provides housing for the homeless. I
think that paper route served him well in many ways.
This past week I helped another person with his paper route,
a guy at church whose 99 Taurus blew a head gasket. It was a high mileage car and he didn’t pay
much for it, however it may have lasted longer had it not been pressed into
service on a rural motor route for our local paper. It’s a tough business, being a driver for a
motor route. Tough mainly on
vehicles. I was able to see that
firsthand when I drove for him Monday. He
was in the process of putting that problem, and that car, behind him. To do so he needed a little help. He asked I pick him up so we could be at the
local paper at 7:30 a.m..
“I need to get to my parking spot. If the papers aren’t there we may sit in the
park for a while.”
Being early is neither my strength nor my preference. Actually, I hate being early. This smacked of a deliberate and planned
early arrival. I have yet to find that either
desirable or useful. But I bit my
tongue, arrived in plenty of time, and as we got to the big delivery door in a downtown
alley behind the newspaper building he instructed me to back in, rear bumper by
the building, not too far but not too close to the van parked next to it. I backed in.
“That’s a little too close,” he said. I pulled out and backed in again.
“Just right.”
We sat there. He
asked if I wanted to go to the park but I declined, preferring to stay and
watch what developed. There was nothing
to do. Earliness was setting in. I worked
on the Monday Tribune crossword puzzle with a yellow pencil. I had a cup of coffee from my thermos. We chatted.
More cars came and parked beside us.
A van parked directly in front of us, perpendicular to my headlights,
hemming us in.
“How will we get out?”
“You’ll see after we’re loaded.”
“Does the truck from Kankakee with the papers come on time?”
“Not always.”
The drivers of the vehicles were milling around us, talking.
Then a big honking truck with an equally large bearded driver arrived. Pallets of papers were transferred to the
building, and the process that brings a paper to your door began.
Bundles of papers bound with a yellow plastic band and
covered with a “top sheet” were tossed into piles near the doorway and the
drivers began to take them back to the cars.
I saw then why being early was an advantage. Closer to the door means you carry your
papers less distance. A stack of
newspapers can be heavy.
“Open the rear door on your side,” he said, after opening
the rear door on the driver’s side.
“Will we need the trunk?” I’d removed my golf trunks in
case.
“I don’t think so. If
it was Wednesday we would. But the paper
is pretty skinny on Monday.”
He quietly shuttled back and forth from the loading door to
the car, looking carefully at the top sheets, arranging bundles of newspapers
on the hood, roof, and trunk of the Buick.
Then the flow of bundles seemed to stop.
“Any more bundles for truck seven?” he said to the guy in
charge.
“I don’t see any.”
“Should we count them?” I said. I was standing by the trunk.
“We’ll count them after we get them in the car. OK, get on the other side I’ll begin handing
you bundles.”
Glancing at the top sheets, he handed me bound stacks of
papers.
“This one goes on the floor behind your seat.” Next. “On the
seat by the door.” Next. “On the seat in
the middle.” He was similarly placing
papers on his side of the Buick.
“Between us in the front.”
When the car was fully loaded we counted the bundles in each
stack, how many on the driver’s side floor, back seat left, back seat middle,
and so on. Satisfied we had what we
needed in the right places, he announced we were ready to go.
"What's with that 'truck seven' deal?"
"I have no idea where that terminology comes from. Maybe they once had their own truck doing this route."
“How many papers do we have in here?”
“Well, there's always stops and starts. But I'd say right around 800.”
“Wow.”
I looked up through the windshield and like clockwork the
car parked in front of us pulled away, which allowed us to turn south down the
alley. We were underway. Almost immediately we stopped. Our first stop was the machine in front of
the newspaper building itself.
“Now I could use the trunk.
I’ll throw the returns in there.”
I popped it open remotely.
With a long plastic knife like key he opened the machine,
transferred Saturday’s papers to the trunk, put in a bundle of Monday papers,
and we were quickly on our way. We
repeated that same operation at various machines around town. Some of them got surprisingly few
newspapers. We delivered bundles to
housing units, dropped off bundles on various corners for foot routes, and in
doing so met some of the delivery people.
Some twenty years later they seemed unlike my son Dean. Most were adults. It was a bright sunny day so we didn’t bother
to put the bundles in plastic. Soon we
were making our way across the river and west on Route 71 out of town.
Once underway, we spent about an hour in town, filling paper
machines, dropping papers off to carriers, talking to them. The talk ranged from Trump to the Cubs. They too were waiting for our arrival, well
most of them. Some bundles we drove away
from, alone and forlorn on the street.
In concept the paper we were distributing is an evening paper, or
was. The fact that it arrives in Ottawa at
8:30 after it is printed in Kankakee blurs that distinction quite a lot. Let’s just say you get it later in the
day. In truth, the freshness of its news
is the same as the morning Chicago Tribune, which I also get. What I don’t get in the Tribune of course is
local news. I’m a two paper, actual
newsprint kind of guy with another on line.
I hope I can stay that way.
We dropped papers at various homes: in tubes, at the ends of
driveways, and close to doorsteps. I was
surprised at how few houses received a paper.
When I did help Dean with his route a house that didn’t get a paper was
an exception. Now it’s the rule. Many of the homes that did receive a paper
were modest. I tried to figure what that
might mean. No internet? No computer?
Seniors not into technology? It’s
almost impossible to generalize. You’d
need real data. Who knows? I don’t know how print editions sales now
compare with on line sales but my guess is that they’re down considerably. As we headed out of town most of the papers
were gone.
“What’s with all the tubes we don’t put papers in?”
Most every mailbox or group of mailboxes had plastic tubes
for receiving papers but we were putting papers into only a fraction of
them. As we went farther west some tubes
of the neighboring rival paper began to appear.
“You have to request a tube from the paper. But when you stop subscribing no one takes
them down.”
It was a sad sight, those faded plastic tubes, once with a
purpose, now empty and useless.
“They make great birdhouses you know. I have two or three tubes I put papers in with
nests in the back that hatched out baby birds.
I imagine the unused ones have even more nests.”
A subtle reminder for me that everything has a purpose if
you look hard enough.
If you are going to have a motor route delivering newspapers
few would be more beautiful. We followed
71 west as it paralleled the Illinois River past the entrance to Starved Rock
State Park, past Point shelter, up the hill and into the woods. We wound through the curves and canyons,
delivering papers occasionally to the homes that border the park. Are there prettier views in the Midwest? Maybe.
I don’t know where. At some point
we turned around and headed back. Near
Catlin Park we headed south out of the river valley and into the beauty of Deer
Park Township.
You don’t have to be a farm kid to appreciate Deer Park but
it may help. To a city person it might
look empty. To me it is chocked
full. Above us was uninterrupted blue
sky dotted with clouds. The road wound
between fenced pastures, bean fields, corn taller than I’ve ever seen, farm
ponds. You’ll still find working farms,
barns, and shed mixed in with those no longer in use, even an occasional corn
crib. There are beautiful farmsteads in
Deer Park, with unimagined views. It’s a
rural paradise and we were in it, winding our way over blacktop and gravel
roads, turning this way and that, dropping off papers but mostly soaking up the
quiet stillness of the day.
Rangy red and white Hereford cattle and compact black Angus
switched flies with their tails in the shade.
Hawks stood watch on utility poles.
Ground squirrels scurried across the road. When we stopped to push papers into plastic
tubes on flimsy posts dragonflies hovered near the windshield. Farm families and wannabe farm folks plant
day lilies and holly hocks by their mailboxes.
Bees buzzed near the blooms. My
friend pointed out one of his favorite places, a mud puddle where, when it
rains, a cloud of yellow butterflies congregate, stirring and filling the air
when he pulls in the drive. He takes it
slow there, trying to be gentle on his struts he says. I bounced the Buick through roughly.
“I try to be good to my car out here. The more gentle I can be the longer it will
last.”
How long your vehicle lasts on the rural delivery route is
the wild card of the independent business person who delivers your newspaper in
the country. Supplying the vehicle, replacing
brakes and tires, making the repairs are, along with the price of gas, the wild
cards hard to factor in to what your delivery person makes in the way of
profit. They pay their own social
security and tax withholding, receive no benefits, and share little risk with
the newspaper. Once the paper puts the
bundles out to be picked up, their job ends and the carrier’s task begins.
“How many miles do you drive a day again?” I said.
“About 90.”
“Well then heck, I bet eighty of those miles are driven out
here in the country.”
“Yeah, that’s about right.”
“And you said out of 800 papers we delivered 720 of them in
town.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So that makes a print edition of the paper delivered way
out here damn expensive. That’s one
paper every mile.”
“Well, only if you want to look at it that way. That sounds bleak.”
“I don’t know how else to look at it.”
A for profit business maintains buildings, pays a staff of journalists
and support staff, buys newsprint and ink, maintains a printing press, a fleet
of trucks and then pays drivers to drive anywhere a subscriber lives to deliver
an actual product to their home every day but Sunday. Every day.
That same content, like the content you are reading right now, can be
sent in a digital file to your computer, tablet, or smart phone virtually
free. Do you pay to receive Dave in the
Shack? Does Dave in the Shack cost me
anything to distribute? That’s a
definite NO to both. By that standard a printed
newspaper delivered to your home is wildly expensive. How much longer can and will that expense be
maintained? How many fewer subscribers, wanting
and willing to pay for the cost of a paper version of the newspaper, will it
take before rural home delivery ends?
My friend loves his job.
He’s done a lot of different things in his life, but being a rural mail
carrier is just right for now. He’s come
home to this area after being away for a long time. He’s starting over. Being independent to a large degree, spending
time by himself, having time to think and put his life in order is perfect for him. I saw firsthand how nice it might be, until I
imagined my car breaking down, until the snowstorms hit, until the price of gas
goes up and the pay doesn’t. But that’s
all in the future. For now my friend is
out there, every day, taking in the summer solitude like a Zen master in an old
Pontiac Bonneville (with the good V-6 engine) enjoying work every day. Working, for you perhaps, and happy to serve
you.
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