Summer sweat, summer rain, summer jobs.
Summer sweat, summer rain, summer jobs.
When I was a kid, working class kids, boys mostly, but a few girls, earned their spending money by delivering newspapers or mowing neighbors’ lawns or de-tassel corn if you lived in town. Farm kids raised a cow, or a hog, or baled hay.
All of the above involved sweating under hot summer suns, smelling like lawnmower exhaust fumes and a demarcation line across your forehead where your ball cap rode. By the end of the summer, the ball cap smelled, had an impermeable sweat stain and was the last thing you reached for as you left the house. By Labor Day it mysteriously vanished, likely consigned to the trash can by a mother fed up with its sweaty, smelly characteristics. It would be mourned for a day or two, until the excitement of new jeans, fresh paper notebooks and returning classmates eased the loss.
New leather shoes came once a year. August. If times were good, a new pair of sneakers in May, if not, the school year’s leather shoes and bare feet carried you through the summer months.
I loved the introduction to capitalism of working as a newspaper delivery boy. Folding the papers, filling the canvas bag strapped to my bike, or carried over my shoulder. The wealth of a Saturday after collecting the week’s tab from my customers. The money jingling in my pockets, enabling me to spring for sodas or milkshakes at Flesor’s Candy Kitchen for my brother and cousins. Stashing money back in my piggy bank. Buying comic books and BB’s for my BB gun with my own money. Ah, yes, the joys of hard-earned wealth. Th glory of watching the sun rise over crunching December snow could make even a twelve-year-old stop for its beauty.
Newspaper delivery earned money year-round, unlike mowing grass, which only provided wealth during the spring and summer months. Newspaper delivery was a much better gig than mowing grass. During the warmer months, you could ride your bike to deliver the paper, which is a whole lot more fun than breathing the exhaust fumes from the Briggs and Stratton engined, lawnmower which regularly gave you blisters from repeatedly yanking the start cord of the balky engine. Check the gas. Pull out the choke. Yank the starter cord. Nada. Push in the choke. Pull the cord. Nada. Repeat. Eventually it fires. The blisters from the wooden handled starter cord raised between your thumb and forefinger sting as the sweat runs down your forearms while pushing the mower over bluegrass, crabgrass and dandelions.
The exhaust fumes cling to your skin and linger in your nostrils, overpowering the smell of the clipped grass.
Altogether far more unpleasant odors than the fresh air breezing past as you pedal the red Western Flyer down the summer sticky chip and tar streets. Sundays were the tough days delivering newspapers. The Sunday paper was huge compared to the Monday through Saturday daily editions. The Sunday edition, with its multi-page colored comics that I so loved to read, and ad inserts was bulky and hard to fold. It quickly filled the canvas bag and the rear wire side baskets. The weight of the papers made the bicycle top-heavy and hard to handle. The loaded front basket made the front handlebars pull to the left as you right-handedly threw the paper into the customer’s yard, causing the bike to topple over, spilling papers and curses under your breath.
The smell of the ink, while it filled your nostrils as you folded the papers, didn’t hang with you the way the exhaust fumes did.
For one brief summer period I was among the uber wealthy, as I had both a morning paper route and an afternoon one. In the morning, I delivered the Chicago Daily News, which came in from Chicago on the Illinois Central, while in the afternoon I delivered the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. Delivering the News-Gazette was almost a traitorous act, as my mother worked as a proof-reader for its cross-town rival, the Champaign-Urbana Courier.
Working two newspaper routes still left the middle of the day free for sandlot baseball, cowboys and Indians and dirt clod throwing.
I much preferred the Chicago paper as it paid far better than the News-Gazette. Also, since it was a morning paper (at any rate it was a morning paper downstate) once I’d finished my deliveries by 8 am or so, I was free for the rest of the day, that is until I added the News-Gazette route to my daily routine.
My dad taught me an early lesson in marketing and consumer preferences when I first started delivering the Chicago paper. I initially delivered the papers to the houses in the subdivision nearest our house then worked my way north circling around to eventually finish back at our house.
“Do your route in reverse. Start at the north, work your way around and finish with the subdivision last,” he told me.
“Why should I do it that way? It makes more sense to get the one right across the street and work my way north, rather than skip them and come back,” I replied.
“The people on the north side are working men. They have to go to work early, so they want their paper before they go to work. The people who live in the new subdivision work in offices so they don’t have to go to work so early and you can deliver their papers last, but still get them there before they leave for work,” he said.
Important class distinction. Important marketing lesson. Know your customers and meet their needs. The newspaper district manager who had me deliver to the subdivision first didn’t know his customers needs, my dad, a working man himself, did.
My mom taught me an important lesson too. One summer day the rain began just as I finished folding the papers so that sidearm toss would land them near the front door as I pedaled my bike near the edge of their lawn. I asked her how I was going to deliver the papers in the rain. She replied, “Ride your bike. You’ll get wet, but you won’t melt. Just make sure you get the papers up on the porch so they don’t get wet.”
She was right, I didn’t melt, the papers didn’t get wet…
© William L. Enyart, 2020.