Chapter One: Home Delivery
Growing up in Royal Oak, Michigan, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to deliver newspapers door to door. For those of you not familiar with this occupation, it was once the denizen of young men who were entrepreneurial and business savvy. You could get a Detroit Free Press, Detroit News or Royal Oak Daily Tribune route when you were 12 years old. This career is now the place for adults who drive cars around your neighborhood and sling papers to the bottom of your driveway. It was formerly a career monopolized by teenagers who walked, rode bikes or if they were non-industrious, they got their parents to drive them around. The latter type usually never lasted, because their parents actually had real jobs and careers, or were busy raising a gaggle of kids at home. These parents soon tired of having a second vocation that entailed them getting up at 5:00 am and driving through the streets of Royal Oak like a prowler.
I was fortunate enough to acquire a Detroit Free Press route from one of the local delivery boys. Did I mention that you actually had to buy the routes from kids? This was not the way the Detroit Free Press handed out these routes, but if you wanted a plum route, you had to have some capital to invest into the purchase of said route. I bought my route for the low, low price of $50, payable out over a 3 month schedule. As it turned out, this was money well-spent. So, at the young age of 11 years old, I was in business for myself.
The Detroit Free Press was the early morning paper for metro Detroit. This meant that you had to get up at 4:30 am and get out there to deliver your wares. For a young man, this could be a daunting task. That alarm clock became a despised adversary, who tore you out of your warm bed on those cold winter mornings. After a while, you actually got used to it and this form of living was a good building block for various careers. You could either plan on a military career or go into the produce business. Believe it or not, I ended up slinging fruits and vegetables, but that is another chapter.
The set up that the Free Press used was actually pretty simple. The circulation manager would have his own route that he had to manage. He would drop papers off at his carrier’s houses, so that they could complete the process of getting the paper to the customers doors before 7:30 am. Yes, back then we would actually put the paper in your mailbox, on your doorstep or even inside your storm door. Your level of service received was in direct proportion to the tip that you provided your carrier every week. And since we actually had to collect for our deliveries every week, we knew who the good tippers were.
The first few months went by very smoothly. So smoothly in fact, I was ready to increase my market share of the early morning paper delivery business. Another carrier was going to be going to high school soon and had decided that it was not cool for a high school student to have a paper route. Why get up early, deliver papers, spend 3 hours a week collecting the money for them and have to work 7 days a week? Remember, paper boys did not pay taxes back then and what you earned, you kept. No, this kid wanted to get a job at a restaurant, washing dishes, dumping garbage and other fun food service work. He wanted to give Uncle Sam his due and take orders from another pimple-faced teenager. Yeah, he was moving up in the world. Anyway, it was good for me that I was pretty good at running my route and the district manager, Frank Grayson, asked me if I would be interested in another one. It so happened that the route he wanted me to take was right next to the route I had. So, for a few more dollars, I doubled the size of my route. Things were going well.
Frank was a great manager. He was about 6’3 and 260 pounds (maybe a biscuit shy of 275) and as fun-loving and gregarious as possible. My best guess puts him at 42-43 years old. He was an olive-skinned, Mexican. He sported thick black hair and always had a thick, bushy jet-black mustache. His mustache was his pride and joy.
He drove a beat up old Dodge maxi-van that was perfectly suited for the newspaper delivery business. He was married and had a few kids that were making their way through junior high school. Frank loved to smoke Tiparillos and eat greasy hamburgers from the Lantern restaurant in Royal Oak. He worked hard and told me to make sure that I did well in school, so that I did not have to sling papers for a career. He was Mexican through and through and gave me a deep respect for hard, meaningful work, no matter what the occupation was. He was always on time and rarely missed a day of work. He was not even close to being a slacker.
Did you ever hear the story about counting chickens before they hatch? Well, I did. I was not ready for my district manager to take his vacation. He had to get another substitute manager to run his route while he was enjoying the sunny Florida winter. He selected Jim Mayor to run his route. Mr. Mayor was also now going to be the substitute manager every Wednesday. Up until then, Frank had another substitute manager named Marty. Marty was an interesting character and actually you could write a book solely about him. However, he was a good guy and that would not serve the purpose of this book. Let’s put it this way. Marty could have played Shaggy on the Scooby Doo cartoons on Saturday morning. Actually, he may have.
Mr. Mayor was not Frank. He was a whole different package all together. He was in his late 50’s and was Lebanese by birth. He was about 5’9 and weighed all of about 150 pounds, soaking wet. He chain smoked Marlboros, which definitely did not help his already wrinkled complexion. He wore frumpy old clothes and drove a beat-up old Ford van. He always had a Donnegal cap on his head and a cup of coffee in his hand. If he could get you to take the papers out of his truck, so that he did not have to put down his cigarette and coffee, you would be life-long buddies. He was married and had a brood of about 7 kids. He looked worn out and my best guess says that he was. I never saw him smile and with the kind of attitude he was pumping, I could understand why.
Well, Mr. Mayor had a whole different idea about getting the papers to the carrier’s houses. He would drop them off about 90 minutes later than Frank. This meant that I had to bust tail to get my routes done before I had to leave for school in the morning. It got so bad that I was late getting to school, which was not acceptable to the nuns at Shrine Elementary. Soon I was asked by the nuns to spend some quality time with them on Saturday, picking up trash around the school or looking for 9 letter words in that months National Geographic. I had just assumed my place in the Saturday Jug lexicon. Soon I would be a regular there and the nuns would have a chair with my name plastered all over it. Eventually, when the Friday announcements would begin, I would start my trek down to Sister Patricia Marie’s office to pick up the hated Jug slip. I did not even have to wait for the Jug roll call to be announced, I just knew I was a welcomed member every week.
This went on for about 6 months and finally I got sick of spending my Saturdays being the nun’s personal janitorial crew. I asked Frank if he could talk to Jim and get him to deliver my papers earlier. He must have gotten through to Jim, because on the following Wednesday, my papers ended up in a huge puddle in my driveway. I guess Jim did not like little kids complaining about his work habits. Now, I had to call the office and get him to bring me some dry papers that I could get to my customers. Needless to say, I was late for school again.
Eventually, Mr. Mayor and I had it out completely. I got on the phone with Frank’s boss and told him what was happening and that I felt that Jim was treating me this way because I had complained. Well someone told Frank about it and told him that he needed to deal with it. By that time, my route had expanded enormously, and I was delivering the most newspapers of any paper boy in the area. Frank even asked me if I would like to make extra money stuffing the Sunday advertising sections into the newspapers that he had to deliver to the newsstand boxes. He told me to just put up with Mr. Mayor and things would work themselves out.
Sure enough, they did. After another episode of wet papers, Mr. Mayor was asked by the Detroit Free Press office to move to another district. This was my first experience of dealing with a real tool of the trade. I had my paper routes for the next few years and those were pretty uneventful. By the time I got to be a junior in high school, it was time to trade the papers for ceramics.
