I had a paper route starting in 1976 to late 1977 (junior high school years). Number of papers (The Ontario, CA-based *Daily Report, *long since swallowed up into another owner and name) varied between 25 to 27, IIRC. It was $3.35 per month and it was many times a bear to collect those funds from some folks. My buddy who gave me that part of the route simply advised me to "throw the paper on the roof - you can say you *delivered *it." I never had the heart to do so - I guess in retrospect I should have thrown it on the roof! So my route covered several very flat miles (rural housing with mild traffic) so I *inherited* my middle brother's Schwinn Varsity 10-speed (you know, the green one). The bicycle obviously made deliveries easy *and *fast. An interesting factoid: I don't think I ever got a flat tire on that bike(!). In fact, I rode that darned thing sometimes to and from Junior High School. Never carried a pump, tools or spares. Sheesh!
Carried the papers in a canvas double-pouched bag (front and back). Loaded up the papers to be balanced. When the front pouch was empty I would rotate it around for the remaining batch of papers (all on the fly while rolling). For this paper, it was 7 days per week and the Sunday Edition (typically dropped off Saturday evening) was extra thick and heavy, loaded with advertisements and coupons. I disliked Sunday mornings, but it was what it was. My route was in Southern California where it rarely rained, but when it did I had to place each paper in a plastic bag and wrap it with a rubber band. Took extra time to obviously do that. The Sunday edition would barely fit inside those plastic bags. It was a daily chore (Monday through Friday was always after school) and because I threw relatively few papers, I ended up earning only about $1 per day. I had to pay all costs (wholesale cost of papers, plastic bags, rubber bands, etc.) upfront. After paying those bills and collecting what was owed me, I simply kept the surplus. It ended up being about +$27 per month. I do recall that the guy who delivered the bulk papers to me was an *older* college kid. He was amazing as he would always deliver my bundle early - it would always be sitting outside our door when I got off the school bus or rode home (on my brother's Schwinn Varsity). I can understand today why one has to do it in a vehicle: that person probably delivers hundreds, if not thousands per day, all over a large geographical region. Jeff Claremont, CA On Monday, September 6, 2021 at 9:11:33 AM UTC-7 Patrick Moore wrote: > Dave Moulton has an interesting little post on his blog today about > the disappearance of the paper boy. I don't recall ever having seen > one except (always!) in movies, but then we lived when I was a boy in > the US in what was still a semi rural area, and the rest of the time > overseas. All the newspaper deliverers I've seen have been middle aged > people in cars. > > http://davesbikeblog.squarespace.com/blog/2021/9/6/the-newspaper-boy.html > > I do recall working followup for the 1990 census on a bike! (I did > similar work for the 1980 census in my car in a very rural part of NW > Georgia; now that was interesting -- like Deliverance except that the > people were very nice, even though I was -- to them -- a Yankee > Oriental who was asking way too many personal questions.) > > > > -- > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > Patrick Moore > Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/ee819cb0-4d91-41e5-b458-f1ec9867eceen%40googlegroups.com.
