A Legacy Project

Recall one of your first jobs. Where was it? What did you do? Were there co-workers? What did you learn?

I was a paperboy for the Midland Daily News. My brother Tom had delivered those papers for a while. Then he passed the job down to me. MDN ran papers six days a week. I had 30-40 customers and made $10-12 a week. What you see on tv, the kid on his bike with a bag of folded newspaper slung over this shoulder? That was me. I came home from school, folded papers, and made my deliveries. The Saturday paper was the biggest. When I finished folding, I had printers ink all over my hands. A subscriptioin to the paper cost 40 cents. People were mostly nice. I collected on Saturdays. On my belt I had one of those metal coin changers. (One icy day in December I fell off my bike and landed on that changer. It was really painful!) Sometimes people didn’t pay. “I only have a $20. Can you make change?” And of course i couldn’t make change. One day when I went to collect, the woman in the house was breast-feeding her baby. I think I had never seen a breast before. The house was hot and smelled funny.