When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #50

50-Paper routes – yuck!

Have you ever had a job you thought would be such great fun and it turned out that you hated it?

When I was about 12 years old I was a papergirl. I had a paper route of about 25 customers that I took the Alamogordo Daily Newspaper to them on my bicycle. At first I thought this would be a fun job. I would do it after school. I was the first papergirl in my town to deliver papers. My brother Geoffrey had a paper route too and had way more customers than I did. I only lasted about 6 months and gave that job up. It was something you had to do every single day, rain or shine. I didn’t mind delivering the papers so much; it was the ‘collecting’ for the paper. It was 75 cents per month. You’d think that would not be such a financial burden on people to collect would you! Some people wouldn’t answer the door and I had to go back several times and ug, I hated it! Most of my customers were so nice and would always pay and a couple of them would tip me a quarter. I liked that part!

Well I had a bad experience one day. One customer we had lived a quarter of a mile down the road from us and I went up to the door as usual to collect and he invited me in (he was about 50 years old) and I said, ‘no thank you.’ I was there to collect for the paper. He got out his wallet and gave me a dollar but then he said he wanted to give me a hug. I wasn’t too sure of that and hesitated and started to back away from the door. He sort of grabbed me and gave me a hug and then pinched my chest and started for my top button and I wrenched away and ran for my bike and went home and told my parents. That scared me to death! My mom told my dad when he got home from work and boy oh boy was he mad! He called the man up (my dad knew him and they were friends) and I will not repeat the conversation on my dad’s end of the phone, but I stopped delivering papers and that was the end of that job.

I can remember having to walk to school and I was so afraid to walk past his house. I remember I would run like the wind for several blocks going past his house and I never saw him again. My dad later told me that the man’s wife really gave him a bawling out for what he did!

My brothers, Geoff and Doug, and Gayle all delivered the El Paso Times and Herald Post and Alamogordo Daily News. That El Paso Times was a morning paper and the Herald Post was an afternoon paper. The Daily News was an afternoon paper. They had over 300 customers. They delivered papers on their motorcycle. It was a source of income we all needed to help buy school clothes and gave them spending money. Our family did that for 4 years. We all HATED having the paper routes! The morning route the boys got up around 5am to deliver papers, 7 days a week! I remember it was so cold one winter morning and it had snowed and my brother Doug came back on his BMW motorcycle and he was almost froze and so cold. That did it. We ended the paper routes shortly after.

All my kids had an interest at one time or other to deliver papers. We strongly discouraged it because we knew what was involved! I think it was Douglas who helped his friend Amelia Holland one summer deliver a weekly paper for a month. I had to go with him and I could still wrap a newspaper in 3 seconds and rubber band it! It was a skill that never left me. Once you’ve folded newspapers, you never forget how. After a month of doing Amelia's route for her, when she came back, he did not want anymore to do with it.

Lisa took on a paper route while she was pregnant with LaRue and had it a few months and gave it up. It’s a thankless job. Very few people appreciate the effort and many like to complain about the service, but they do enjoy reading their paper.

* Correction! Oops! Glad someone reads these to keep me on task!
This just in from Lisa--
Well LaRue was actually about a year and a half old, I don't think I would have had the energy to get up in the middle of the night every night for five months if I'd been pregnant. No way.