Paperboy

While mowing lawns and doing other chores for hire was a good source of income for me in my tween years, I also had the stereotypical suburban kid’s career of paperboy for a number of years.

Incidentally, the “boy” part of the word paperboy seemed weird even when I was very young, especially since the person who taught me the ropes was herself very much not a boy. I noticed with some degree of awe that Carrie would walk around the neighborhood, delivering a local newspaper—one of those weekly regional papers that relied heavily on local ads and whose journalistic department wasn’t likely to win a Pulitzer any time soon.

Carrie taught me not only how to deliver the papers throughout the neighborhood (they went on the edge of the porch, never into the mailbox) in a thoughtful manner, street by street so the route was efficient; she also taught me how to walk up to houses, one at a time, and ask for money.

That’s right—we were paid a pittance from the newspaper for doing all that labor on their behalf, and it probably worked out to something like $1 an hour… unless you got more by asking. In language that would make George Orwell proud, we called it “voluntary pay week”, and mentioned that as we went on to explain that we would like to know if they’d like to give a dollar to their impoverished newspaper delivery person.

I honestly can’t remember if we even got to keep all the begging strips we were given in pity, but regardless, I saw clearly that you could make much more money if you walked around to every house once a month and asked for a dollar. Inevitably, some would give you a dollar, and occasionally, a person might even give you five bucks.

Five bucks wasn’t life changing, but it did represent somewhere between 6 and 9 new comic books from the newsstand. It also meant you could go see a new movie, or 5 second-run movies (guess which I would usually opt for?).

One big takeaway from being a paperboy was to become process oriented. If you had a couple hundred newspapers to deliver to houses, you first had to assemble the pieces of newspaper—sometimes there was an ad inserted, and you had to make sure the sections were in order—you wanted to make sure your process was quick and efficient.

For the local newspapers I delivered, I started by rolling the assembled paper up, then inserting it into little waterproof plastic tubes. You could sort of grab the rolled-up, bagged paper by the end of the bag and chuck it pretty far once you got good at that sort of thing.

Next, I followed that methodical route Carrie had plotted for me, carefully making sure not to waste time by covering any territory twice, and making sure to always take efficient routes. My family moved neighborhoods around this time, and I plotted my own route in the new 'hood myself.

Finally, since it was a weekly paper, the “voluntary pay week” came about once a month, so it was important to have a careful process to make sure to knock on every door, hopefully at a time when you can get an answer. I might have written the “not homes” down on a little notepad for a return visit, or I might have just remembered the houses… I really can’t remember.

Besides having a robust process, those sales skills I mentioned earlier—having the tenacity to walk right up to someone and ask for money, for crying out loud—they came in very handy years later, when I was running a business and looking for customers. Between the process of developing my own logistical plan and asking for money, I had some very good future-business-owner DNA at a young age.

Atari even created a video game called (wait for it) Paperboy, with the idea of solving some of those sorts of problems in pixel form. The plot of this game is really straightforward, exactly as it sounds. You get to live that wild paperboy lifestyle.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this sort of experience for every young kid, but I do recommend some kind of activity where you can directly impact how much money you make. Kids need to understand that there is a correlation between what you put in and what you get out, and there’s not like some magic tree that just grows everything you need for you for free.

As the paperboy, I was the delivery mechanism for information, which strikes me as a profoundly sacred act. Information reached people in lots of different ways, even during the pre-internet days of the 70s and 80s. People got their news by way of radio waves and television broadcasts, but they also read a lot of print media like magazines and newspapers.

All that print media was delivered and distributed by human beings, ultimately one newspaper or magazine at a time. We paperboys played an important role.

There are lots of pop references to paperboys, including a punk rock song, the aforementioned popular video game, and popular shows like The Simpsons and Family guy prominently featuring episodes where paperboys are central to the plot.

If you’ve ever seen the 80s classic Better Off Dead, the persistent paperboy who really wants his two dollars probably sticks in your mind more than anything else from the film:

Last but not least, Chris Elliot played a grownup paperboy living with his parents in the cult classic Get a Life. Ready to cringe a bit?

Now, let’s turn to you. Did you deliver papers as a kid? If not, what are some cultural references to the paperboy motif you can think of? Did you enjoy Get a Life or Better Off Dead, or are those better left in the dustbin of nostalgia?