“I want my two dollars!!”

A 13-year-old boy gets home from another regular day at school. Two to three stacks of newspapers, roughly half his 4-foot-8-inch height, patiently wait for him on the corner of his driveway. He walks into the house, grabs a snack, and walks into the garage to start folding the papers for delivery.

He pulls out a worn brown three-legged stool from under the shelves loaded with cleaning supplies and toilet paper and grabs the large red-and-black Folgers coffee can that he has filled with green rubber bands. You know, the thick ones that hurt more in the rubber band fights he has with his brothers; the ones that always get them in trouble when his dad finds the rubber bands strewn behind his recliner. After a while, the boy settles down to a rhythm:

Thump! goes his hand.
Snap! goes the band.

Down! goes the paper.

After around 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the day of the week and size of the newspaper, he returns to the house to wash off the inevitable black newsprint from his hands and start his route.

He grabs his newspaper bag, throws it over his shoulders like a Mexican poncho and begins to fill it up with that day’s papers. Once one side of the bag becomes too heavy with banded papers, he slides it around his body with a practiced ease and fluidity like a professional dancer. Wednesday’s and Sunday’s, with their multiple advertisement fillers, always meant more than one trip from his house to his customers. If he’s lucky, though, he fits all of his 70-80 customers for one long trip.

He jumps on his bike, careful of the shifting weight on his shoulders until he’s delivered about a quarter of his route, then breezes through the rest, whistling snatches of a tune or lost in his thoughts.

End of the month rolls around, and it’s time to collect. He spends about a week or so biking to his different customers’ houses, sometimes visiting two or three times before he catches someone at home.

“Hi, I’m your paperboy. I’m here to collect.” he says so often that he often doesn’t even think about it. Sometimes he gets put off with an excuse, but most of his customers pay him with a check and a smile. After he’s finally collected the month’s subscription from everyone, he does his count to see how much he’s made this month.

The holidays (and February because of its length and the fewer number of papers) are the best for tips; people are in a good mood and willing to spread it around. He gets charged a certain amount for each paper he receives, and also any supplies like rubber bands or plastic bags to wrap the papers in during rainy weather. On a good month, he can make over $150 for a couple of hours work a day.

OK, I hear you — $150 for about 60 hours of work isn’t a whole lot — but let me tell you what else that boy earned (and learned):

  • Responsibility — every day, it was his duty to get those papers out. Not his parents’, not his brothers’ or sister’s, his. He took pride in every paper not being soggy or wet and every paper being on each customer’s front porch.
  • Dealing with people — want to learn how to be polite even you think someone’s jerking you around? Want to know when to be friendly and give a little, and when to be hard and not give an inch? Have your monthly check depend on it.
  • Money — did the newspaper company overbill him for supplies or newspapers? Which customers still owed him money from the month before?

Probably the most important thing the boy learned, however, was:

  • Pride — he liked being able to say he hadn’t had a customer complaint for three months running; he liked being able to pay the job’s bills on time and even have some money left over; he really liked knowing he never did a half-assed job.

Yeah, that boy was me and I sometimes wonder whether there are kids like that left in the world any more. Nowadays — if we even hear about “paper deliverers” (the new P.C. way to call them) — they’re adults who are making a little extra cash (if the newspaper even puts out printed copies any more).

I hope there are some left, though, who can take the same joy and pride in a job well-done. God knows, kids today need as much joy and pride as they can get.

(revised from an original opinion column published in The East Carolinian)

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