A Tribute to Newspaper Boys

Newspaper boys are no more. But once they were everywhere. Mostly Boomers and those before us. Young. Living in times so different from today that it almost feels foreign now.

We ran small businesses.

We bought papers, sold them for more than we paid, and kept the profit. Four, five, maybe more dollars a week. It mattered.

Every afternoon we came home from school, grabbed our bundles, and headed out to our routes.

We delivered Saturday and then Sunday morning. Up at 4 a.m., rain or shine. Snow or heat. Six afternoons a week, and then that heavy Sunday paper delivered in the morning. Comics, ads, stuffed inserts. We stuffed those papers ourselves just after 4 a.m. The load was often more than we could reasonably carry.

But we carried it.

I had two routes. One was the “Dayton Daily News” – delivering weekday and Saturday afternoons and then Sunday morning; the other was the “Journal Herald” which was delivered every morning but Sunday. That one was the toughest, because it was before school – every day.

When it snowed, the burden was worse.

We walked the streets alone in those days. Long before anyone worried much about such things. The idea of being attacked or harmed did not cross our minds. Or our parents’, at least as far as we knew.

On snowy mornings there was a lonely pall. You could hear the whistles of distant trains moving things in and out of the valley. The Miami Valley. Dayton, Ohio.

Those were formative years. We were 12, 13, 14. Learning exchange. Learning profit. Learning hustle. Learning that most people were honest. Some were not, and we learned to accommodate that too.

No earbuds. No streaming. Maybe a transistor radio if you were lucky, but not at 4:30 in the morning. Nothing to do but ride, walk, pull, deliver. And get home early enough to crawl back into bed for one more hour of sleep.

Each generation has its character. Not better or worse. Just different.

My generation, the young Baby Boomers, was large. Competitive. No internet. Transistor radios were high tech. And in the blustery winter mornings before 6 a.m., we did our jobs. We learned life lessons.

There is a toughness that came from that. We had it better than our parents and grandparents, but we were still close enough to a world where real was real. Life pushed back physically. You felt it in your hands, your legs, your lungs.

And fear was not part of the equation.

One memory stays with me. I lost my papers in the snow one morning. The whole stack spilled into the street. I wandered through the snow gathering them up, restuffing them into the bag. My bike leaned against a tree, overloaded, threatening to fall again. If it did, I would have to unload it completely. The weight was beyond what I could manage easily.

The train whistles cut through the still air. An underlying chorus to a worldly story……

I was lonely. I was frustrated………..And I got it done.

And I grew.

I would trade nothing for those early experiences.

A few years ago I wrote a song as a tribute to those of us lucky enough to have lived that life.

Below is a video I made for that song.

And below that is a documentary by “Before It Vanished” that captures it well.

I wrote this in 2021. It is called “Echoes of the Valley”

A documentary by “Before It Vanished………” – a great look at what it was like.