These Dreams

{Prompt: What was it like before you went to NCSSM in 1980?}

It’s dark outside, except for the moon sinking on the horizon, and the streetlights casting their incandescent glow.  As I drive, with my window down, the cold morning air swirls past my left ear and my neck. It swirls into the back seats, and then back around again.  The naturally cool, fresh air from outside mixes with the heated air from the car vents, which is variably hot or cold.

The unfolded newspapers ruffle in turbulence in the passenger seat beside me, demanding my attention. I put a folded paper on top of the pile, to keep the pages from fluttering up… and open… and falling apart.  At some point I will stop to fold and band the rest of the unfolded pile, but for now, I will weigh down the loose papers and deliver the ones I have already banded.

So I’m tossing out the papers, one at a time, onto the driveways of the houses in the neighborhood. I’m driving around in the predawn hours making my paper deliveries.  One to this house.  One to that house. One to the next house.  Everything is going smoothly, under control.

But I begin to realize that I haven’t been paying attention to the house addresses.  I’ve been doing my route on autopilot.  I haven’t been checking that the right house got the paper. After a while all the driveways start to look the same.

Was I supposed to deliver a paper to that last address?  Are they on vacation? Did they put a stop on the delivery?

I’ll have to check my list of subscription customers. Where is it?  My list seems to be missing!

Oh!  Hold on.  Wait a minute.  This isn’t my route, at all!  I’m only subbing this route for another carrier.

I need his list of subscribers. Where is it?  Did he give it to me?  It must be somewhere. 

Oh, shit.  I can’t find it.  Well… so, I can’t find it… so what?  I should know it by memory.  I’ve done the route with him enough times.  I should know it by now.

But I can’t remember the route. And I can’t find the list. Nothing is going according to plan. None of these customers is getting their paper today.  Or maybe, all of the houses are getting a paper instead, whether they have a subscription or not! 

I only have a finite supply of newspapers.  And I can’t deliver them properly.  What can I do?

And then, I wake up.  It’s all a dream. I’m not delivering newspapers today, or any other day.

In fact, I’m a retired family doctor.  I retired 5 years ago.  I stopped delivering papers a long time ago.  So long, in fact, that I have to do a little math.  It was about 45 years since I did a morning newspaper route.

But I still dream about it. Or should I call it a nightmare? I am literally haunted by my time as a “paperboy”, when I was a teenager in Raleigh.  Let me explain.

The Raleigh Times

Lots of kids had an afternoon paper route when I was young.  It was fun, because you were out on your bike, and out in the neighborhood.  And it was the way that you made extra money, before you were old enough to apply for a regular job.* 

 

I was probably 12 years old when I began delivering The Raleigh Times** with my brother.  We rode our bikes up to Johnson’s Pharmacy, three blocks away. We got our stacks of newspapers, and we got to work.

We sat on the sidewalk banding the papers with the #16-sized rubber bands. They had the right combination of give and take.  Strong enough to keep from snapping, and strong enough to keep the paper from unfolding, but stretchy enough to twist up and over the edge of the paper, once… or twice… or even thrice, if necessary. 

If we wanted a relatively flat, aerodynamic paper that could be thrown sideways, floating like a frisbee, then we folded it into thirds, and wrapped the rubber band around it twice. 

If we wanted a solid, conical paper that could be thrown end over end, like an axe, then we folded it in thirds, and then in half again, and we wrapped the band around it three or even four times to keep it tight and stiff.

The tightly bound, weaponized papers weren’t really practical.  They took longer to fold and to band. But they sure were fun to throw at one another, when we had extras.  A game of dodgeball with papers.

When we weren’t trying to bind the papers into tight little knots, we were folding as fast as we could, stuffing the papers into canvas paper bags or into steel bicycle baskets, and heading out to deliver the papers to five or six streets in our neighborhood.  If we split up, we could finish the route twice as fast.  Those were the days!

The 1970s

These were the late 1970s.  I did an afternoon route with my brother, or on my own, between 1976—the year of the national bicentennial—and 1979—the year of the Iran hostage crisis.  In the 1970s, there was no internet… no “social media”… no cell phones.  Personal computing and GPS were only in their infancy.  

It’s hard to imagine, but if we wanted to meet someone… somewhere… sometime, we had to call them on our telephone, arrange a meeting place… and time, and then find them at the designated rendezvous.

To do this you needed their phone number, you needed a telephone connected to a landline, you needed a watch (or clock), and you needed a map (or working knowledge of the streets).  You had to have telephone skills (no texting), memory skills (no cell phone reminders), and navigation skills (no GPS navigators). 

In the ‘70s shopping malls were popular, in part, because there was no online shopping.  Movie theaters were popular because there was no online streaming.  Libraries and books were popular because there were no digital books or online references.  Newspapers and network TV were the major sources of information and the major dispensers of “social media”.

In the ’70s people listened to music on the radio, or on records, or on cassette tapes.  The Sony Walkman, a personal cassette player, was released in 1979, and boom boxes were reaching their zenith.

Typewriters were used for “word processing” and photographic slide machines, with mechanical slide carousels, were used for slideshows.  Film cameras and video cassette recorders were used to record photographs and videos. Xerox machines, fax machines, and the U.S. Postal Service were used to copy, transmit, or deliver letters and documents.

In schools, when we talked about environmental conservation, we imagined a day, only a year or two away, when trees and the paper they supplied would no longer be consumed in such seemingly limitless quantities.  It took about 50 years before that future became a reality.

The News & Observer

In 1977, my mother and my brother began a morning route, delivering The News & Observer..  This was not a “fun” newspaper route.  They did this for a little extra spending money, to help make ends meet, because money was short.

They did this for at least a year and a half, with only my occasional assistance, but in 1979 everything changed.  My brother left for college.  He was almost 18.  I was recruited to help my mother — to continue the route. It meant getting up with her in the morning, every… single… day!  I was 15 at the time.

Mom, on the paper route - circa 1979

A morning route with your mom is not the same as an afternoon route with your brother.  A morning route is bigger… much bigger than an afternoon route. 

And it’s done in the morning — I mean early morning — in the dark, before the sun comes up.

It is sometimes cold.  It is sometimes lonely.  You would be hungry.  And tired.  It is not fun.  It is a job.  

A typical route has 100 to 300 customers, or more.  You need a car to complete the route in a timely manner, and you need to….  no… you have to complete the route in a timely manner.

You complete your route on time, so that the customers can pick up their paper before breakfast, or before heading off to work.  For the convenience of the customers, you wake up at 4:30 in the morning.  You force yourself to leave the comfort of your cozy bed.  You grab a bite to eat, if you didn’t oversleep. And you’re out the door.  That is… you are out the door if you didn’t sit up and say, “I’m awake”, when your mom poked you on your foot before you fell back and fell asleep again.

You need a car to carry the sheer volume of newspapers on a morning route.  The newspapers come to the carrier in bundles, at the distribution point.  A big brown van pulls up to a closed-for-the-night Phillips 66, where the carriers are waiting in their cars or quietly smoking cigarettes.  Two guys start pulling out the bundles from the back of the truck.  They stack them in groups, for 7 or 8 different routes.  On top of the bundles they put a distribution slip, which has the number for the route, the number of papers required, and any particular subscriber requests.

The subscriber might request a vacation hold. Or they might request that you put the paper on their doorstep… or in a mailbox… or on the grass… or on the driveway.  They might just complain… that their front page was wet from the dew on the grass… or chewed up from skidding on the driveway… or just plain missing. 

 A typical bundle is 20 to 25 pounds.  It’s about a foot tall, a foot and a half wide, and a foot deep.  One bundle can hold up to 50 papers, when the papers are thin, on the slow news days, like Mondays.  A bundle can hold 25 papers on days when the papers are thick, filled with grocery store coupons,, like Wednesdays.  Or a bundle might hold only 10 to 15 papers on Sundays, when the papers are bulging, with both advertising inserts, and extra sections.

You want the papers to be thin, so you can get them all in the car at one time.  So you can do your route in one fell swoop.  You can get 8 to 12 bundles in the back seat of your car if you’re doing the route alone. Or you can put 4 to 6 bundles in the back if you want to make room for a “helper.”  The unfolded papers go in the back. And the folded papers — the ones that are ready to be thrown from the window — go in the passenger seat.

So, looking down at the car from a bird’s-eye viewpoint, going clockwise, you would see a “driver” in the front, driving the route and throwing the papers from the window; folded papers in the passenger seat, ready to be thrown; unfolded papers in the rear seat on the passenger side (away from the open window); and a “helper” in the rear seat behind the driver, folding the papers as you go along.

From 1979 to 1980, before I had my driver’s license, I was in the back seat of my mother’s Honda Accord***, and I was the “helper”.

Sitting in the back seat of a Honda, folding papers on a morning paper route, is not an enviable place to be.  There is cold air (or rain) coming in the open window in front of you.  There is the odor of ink and newsprint making you queasy, and the movement of the car making you carsick.

The car is never moving in a straight line. It is constantly weaving back and forth, toward a mailbox, or toward a driveway — around a parked car, or around a cul-de-sac.  We are driving on the left-hand side of the road in the neighborhoods, where traffic is non-existent at five in the morning.  We are driving on the left so we can throw the papers onto the driveway or onto the lawn from the driver’s side window. 

On the secondary roads, where traffic is light, but still a threat, we drive on the right. But then we have to throw the paper over the roof of the car, or stretch out as far as we can to cram the paper through the passenger side window, into the newspaper box next to (or under) the mailbox. 

You can try to throw the paper through the passenger side window, but that never works.  One end or the other will always hit the window frame, stutter, and then plop down in the gutter of the road.  And then you have to stop, walk around the car, and throw it up the driveway properly. It’s the newspaper deliverer’s walk of shame.  It’s not worth the time or the embarrassment.

It’s not bad if you’re the driver.  You don’t get so car sick, because you’ve got eyes on the road.  You get more heat from the air vents in the winter, and less exposure to the cold air from the open window.  The empty roads can give you a feeling of omnipotence, as if you were the only human on the planet, and the empty neighborhoods make you imagine a world without people — a world where frogs and crickets are the most vocal citizens of the night, and birds announce the arrival of dawn with a chorus of twittering.

Or, the driver may choose to listen to the radio instead.  When my mother drove the route, she would listen to Chuck Swindoll, a radio preacher whose radio show, Insight for Living, was broadcast on radio stations nationwide. 

Or she would listen to The Larry King Show, an interview show with a call-in audience from across the nation.   (I truly admire Larry King, most of all, for the flair with which he would abuse and then hang up on any caller that rambled for too long or too far off the topic.  Those callers got treated to Larry’s no-nonsense reprimand, and a “Click.” Then Larry would tell the audience what a nut the caller was.  That was the best part.  Nut cases were not tolerated on The Larry King Show.)

Occasionally she would listen to an FM station, for music instead of talk radio.  At least once a week, stations would broadcast American Top 40, with Casey Kasem, and I suspect it was played on repeat in the wee hours of the morning. 

There was a lot of music that we call yacht rock today, including Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, and the Doobie Brothers; and a lot of what we call soft rock as well: The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Air Supply, for example. 

But there were also stations that played “Oldies”, which at the time could be anything from swing (The Artie Shaw orchestra, The Benny Goodman orchestra, or the Andrews Sisters), to classic country artists (Tammy Wynette, George Jones, or Charley Pride), or pioneer rock and roll (The Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, or Bobby Vinton).

In 1979, “Oldies” could be anything from the 1930s, ‘40s, or ‘50s. This is the music that I might hear in the car, when my mother was driving, if I was lucky! Around this time (the late 1970s) Disco, Punk, Rap, Classic Rock, and Heavy Metal were all making their way into, or out of, the national consciousness. But generally they were not on the radio when my mom was driving.

Sometimes we had trouble — car trouble, or trouble with the weather.  I remember once, when it snowed, on a Sunday, we had trouble doing the route at anything approaching a normal speed.  We were driving slowly that day, and the papers were big. We were so slow and so late, that by the time we finished, there were children and parents out, bundled up in coats, mittens, and gloves playing in the snow.

Another time, there was sleet and freezing rain, and we made the ill-advised decision to attempt to climb a narrow alley off of Medlin Drive — to deliver papers to two or three houses at the top of the hill.  We failed on the first attempt to get up the hill, and on the second attempt we ended up with our car slipping off the side of the road. I still have a picture (starting to brown with age) of a sky blue Honda Acura hatchback, parked at a rakish angle, with one side only a few feet above the dark creek at the bottom of the road, and the other side perched on the icy incline of silvery-black chip and seal road.

Paper delivery in the worst imaginable weather.

I’m not sure how we got home that day; or how we finished the route.  I think we had to walk to a coin-operated phone kiosk at a strip mall nearby, and call for a ride.

When the morning deliveries were done, on the weekdays, I must have gone to school.  But I don’t remember those days.  I only remember the days we headed for the Your House breakfast restaurant, for scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, and grits (or a waffle). Or the days we went back home and I crawled back into the sweet warm covers of my bed.

I remember the morning paper route at night, and I remember my tenth grade high school classes during the day — as if they were two separate worlds.  By day, I was a normal teen, taking classes and going to marching band. By night, I was a newspaper “helper” — an independent contractor.  I was a master of paper folding, banding, and bagging; survivor of back seat confinement and sleep deprivation; an innocent victim of inclement weather, and a learned critic of AM/FM radio content.

Postscript

I only did the morning paper route with my mother for one year, from the fall of 1979 to the summer of 1980.  But it seemed like it was longer.  Much longer.  

After all, I did it every day of the year, seven days a week.  And if the papers were late… or misplaced, there was a vocal group of well informed, news-consuming customers ready to call the N&O to request redelivery.  We had to get it right… on the first run as much as possible.

It was my introduction to work and responsibility. It was my first experience with drudgery and toil.  It was work that left a fine powder of newsprint dust on the car dash and the stain of newspaper ink on my hands and face. 

Perhaps there were perks, in the end.  Seeing the world at night, in a way that few people do. Enjoying the full spectrum of the radio dial. Helping your family in a time of need. Learning to adapt and to persevere.

It produced, in me, a measure of maturity.  And an enduring appreciation for the craft and skill of newspaper men and women.  But it left in me a nascent fear of failure, that still occurs in my dreams.  

I went on to assist other carriers in the future, and I sometimes worked as a substitute carrier when those carriers needed or wanted to take a day off. 

I learned to fold papers, and drive at the same time—driving from one driveway to the next with my knee under the steering wheel.

I got to listen to my own radio station preferences; primarily on the FM radio dial. 

I came to love the Waffle House, which was the usual reward at the end of a completed route. 

I even earned academic scholarships from the News & Observer, paying for a portion of my college expenses — a kind of cosmic retribution. 

If only I could get those pesky dreams to go away.

A Waffle House, like I remember it — early in the morning.

Footnotes:

* Newspaper delivery, baby sitting, acting, and agricultural work are exceptions to the minimum age requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act in North Carolina.

** The Raleigh Times was a local afternoon newspaper dating back to at least 1901, that published its last edition on November 30, 1989.

*** The Honda Accord, by the way, was among the first cars from Japan to be sold in the US around the time of the nationwide gas shortage.  Better fuel efficiency made them more desirable.