Actually, I've never had a newspaperboy or girl. It has always been adult-delivered from a car.
Anyway, these were entry-level, low-skilled jobs for America's teens. US Labor Bureau statistics show that on average by the age 27, men who worked in high school earned an average of a dollar more an hour than those who didn't. (Hey, I worked at Burger King in high school. Must be why I'm so doggone rich.)
A young Benjamin Franklin delivered the Boston Gazette, Thomas Edison sold papers at age 12 and Warren Buffett delivered the Washington Post. See, mess with papers, get rich.
At least one US daily newspaper still employs an all-youth carrier force, the Times News near Allentown, Pennsylvania, with 14,000 subscriptions. Kids get paid 12 to15 cents per delivery.
The paper's publisher of 41 years, Fred Masenheimer, said his carriers still sling canvas bags and risk the occasional dog bite. he was also a teen carrier, delivering the Hanover Evening News. "They used to tell us it was the last 2 cent newspaper in America. So you can imagine how much money we made in a week." Nobody's getting rich as a carrier, "but nobody's getting rich as a journalist these days either."
And there I was, cub reporter for the Palatine High School Cutlass student paper in Palatine, Illinois, and then sports editor my senior year. Another profession I could have gone into and not made much money.
Where's My Paperboy? --Cooter
3 comments:
Your paperboy grew up. He now is probably over thirty, may be female and drives an economical car.
The paper route is a second or third part time job and is necessary to pay the rent after losing the good, full time gig that he/she had held for nine years.
Your paperboy gets up at two-thirty and is at the distribution site by three. If the papers are on time, the papers are folded and loaded by four and delivery begins.
If everything goes OK, the route(s) are done by seven and there us still time to get home, pick up the kids and get them to school by seven forty five.
Then it's off to the second shift at the AM -PM till three, make sure the kids made it home from school before working the dinner crowd at O'Malleys.
The money really sucks, especially when you consider how tough a route is on the car and the price of fuel. Yet, there really aren't many options for picking up a few extra bucks during that 0300 to 0700 time period.
God help him/her if he/she or one of the kids gets sick.
Of course the worker making eleven bucks a day in China is grateful to be working, but I'd bet your paperboy still wishes the widget factory was still open.
I'm just sayin'
Thanks for the post.
I was a paperboy for the Washington Star-News in the mid 1970s. Several years later the paper folded. The two events are completely unrelated. I think.
I never was a paperboy. Looked like too much work, but had I not gotten my fine-paying job with Burger King, $1 an hour and all the Whoppers I could eat, I'd have taken one.
The adult "boys" sure have a hard time of it. I never thought of it as a second or third job, often needed today to make ends meet by us reular folk.
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