Paper Route

I had a paper route for the last two years we lived at Glen View. I was almost ten years old when I took over an existing Raleigh Register route. It was an evening paper five days per week and a morning paper on weekends. I had about forty customers and the starting profit was about $13.00 per month.

Having the paper route meant I had to arise very early on weekends to deliver my papers. Joyce took over part of my route that was near the house we lived in.

I remember one very cold, snowy day that Daddy didn’t go to work. He did drive me around my route so I didn’t have to be out in the blizzard conditions very long without getting warm.

On another occasion, I stayed home from school because I was sick. Mommy said she would walk my route with me because I was sick. I put my coat on and waited in the kitchen for Mommy to get her coat. I suddenly began throwing up. I figured it would be better to throw up in the kitchen sink than in the floor, so I put my head over the sink just in time. I vomited about half of it through my nose. I think some people might call it projectile vomiting.

Virgil Gunther built what we called “the three little houses”. Renters in these houses usually didn’t stay very long before moving on. Anyway, one of my customers was a doughnut delivery man. He didn’t have any room in his house to store the doughnuts, so he made the mistake of storing them on the porch where I left his newspaper. There were several times when I felt confident nobody in the house was awake as I delivered the newspaper early on Saturday or Sunday morning. On those occasions, I would carefully remove one box (one dozen) doughnuts from the large cardboard boxes on his porch. I would eat three or four that day and hide the remainder. The doughnuts were very good. I never was challenged and asked if I had stolen any doughnuts. I do not remember telling anybody about this until now as I write this.

My paper route included the Twin Oaks Country Club, a nine-hole golf course. The property is now Richard Daniel’s winery. About half of the time, I would see pop bottles lying in the grass near the first tee. Golfers would buy a bottle at the clubhouse and finish it as they began playing. I saw the bottles as a business opportunity. I also knew I was stealing them. They were worth two cents each. When I had accumulated six bottles, I could buy a bottle of pop at Henegar’s Store. The pop cost a dime with a two-cent deposit on the bottle if I took it out of the store. Everything was going along pretty well until early one Sunday morning. I was collecting a few bottles at the first tee when I heard a voice say, “Hey!!! Putthose bottles down! I wondered where my pop bottles were going.” The voice was that of a man who worked at the golf course. His first name was Miles. I didn’t know he was sleeping in a building near the tee that we called the pro shop. That was the end of my pop bottle business.

Jack Ball was the manager of the golf course. He also trained boxers. There was a boxing bag hanging in the garage next to the clubhouse. There were several occasions when there would be a small crowd on the patio. The crowd included people who worked there and boys who were caddies. Jack would offer Jimmy Cragget and me twenty-five cents each to put the gloves on and box for three rounds. I would go through quite a bit of inconvenience for a quarter, so I never refused. Jack took advantage of Jimmy and me by letting us fight for about fifteen minutes before calling an end to each round. I would get so tired that I couldn’t hold my hands up in front of me. I would sometimes drop my hands and back away from Jimmy. When he came swinging at me, I would wait until the last second to put my right hand up and let him run into my stationary glove. Everybody who watched the boxing match appeared to be entertained by it. And I could buy three ice cream bars for seven cents each and four pieces of penny candy that Mommy would not know about. If she had known about it, I would have, at a minimum, been rebuked.

One of my customers was a widow, Mrs. Barrett. Her husband had been a bigwig at a coal company, and she appeared to have more money than most of my customers. She also had a dog that owned her yard. The dog would bark and growl like it wanted to chew me to pieces every time it saw me. The dog didn’t have a special dislike for me. It barked at everybody but Mrs. Barrett. I didn’t have to worry about the dog most of the time because I would leave her paper stuck in the fence at her front gate. However, when collection day came, I had to open the gate, climb about seven or eight steps, and walk about fifteen feet on her front porch. If the dog was unaware that I was on the porch, it knew it as soon as I knocked on the door. If the dog was in the back yard, I would knock on her door and run back to the gate. The newspaper subscription price was 88 cents per month. Mrs. Barrett always gave me a dollar and told me to keep the change. She would also give me a Christmas gift. She was a very nice person, but her dog was not nice.