By Lyle R. Rolfe
When I walked down my driveway to get the daily newspaper, Wall Street Journal, I thought back to my grade school days when I delivered newspapers prior to school each morning.
At that time, if memory serves me, it was The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times. The no-longer published Chicago Daily News and Chicago Herald American were afternoon papers as was The Beacon-News.
Back then you could not buy a Beacon route. They were handed down through the family until you ran out of family members. Then they went to your best friend. In those days, every home got a Beacon compared to the Chicago papers. And that was because the Beacon carried all the local news.
The Chicago papers were distributed by Lisberg News Agency on West Galena Boulevard in Aurora. They would deliver the bundles to the carriers very early each morning or mid-afternoon for those papers.
As a carrier, oftentimes you would skip 10 or more houses between subscribers because not everyone bought a Chicago newspaper. It meant spending more time delivering the papers across many blocks as well as more time collecting each week.
Because there were fewer subscribers, the pay was much less. I received $2.50 a week for the morning route and got an extra 5¢ for each $1 collected from the subscribers. There was no extra pay for the afternoon route.
There were occasional tips from some customers, but not as much as the Beacon carriers received.
Kids with Beacon routes really cleaned up on tips during the Christmas season.
Back then there were no plastic bags for the papers. We had to fold them so we could toss them while riding our bikes. We had to be sure they landed on porchs and some customers wanted them in the mailbox or inside the screen doors which meant spending more time.
No curb-side mailboxes back then. Even the U.S. mail carrier walked house-to-house and placed mail in boxes attached to the front of the house, usually on a covered porch.
Morning routes meant delivering the papers prior to school, while the afternoon routes were after school. Most carriers had large baskets on their bikes for the newspaper bag. But once the snow started falling, most of us walked our routes which for deliveries of Chicago newspapers always covered many blocks.
At the end of each week, I visited the subscribers to be paid for the week. Each time someone paid me, I would tear a small receipt out of my collection book for the customer, to show it was paid.
I remember vividly every Saturday morning going to the Lisberg office to turn in my collections and receive my pay. The carriers stood in front of a tall counter with Mr. Morris or Mr. Lisberg peering down on us. I’m not tall today and I was even shorter then and easily intimidated by either of these two men who never seemed to smile.
We watched while they went through our collection books to see who was missed. They would ask why, never changing their stern expressions.
If a customer was more than two or three weeks behind, we were told to go back to collect from that person. When we returned, it better be with the money or a great reason why, before we were paid for the week. For every complaint we received during the week, such as for missed papers or wet papers, we were fined. I think it might have been 25¢ per complaint.
Today, as all of you readers know, your The Voice, the community newspaper, is mailed.
The Beacon and the Chicago papers are placed in plastic bags and tossed out a car window by the driver. They might land in the end of the driveway, on the grass, or even in the edge of the street, but rarely farther than the sidewalk.
And on snow days, you better dig through the snow for the paper before it gets stuck in your snow blower. If this happens, lots of luck getting a fresh copy delivered to your house.
I remember my son having a Beacon route, something I insisted he do for the experience of having to work for his money. On days when the papers were large, I would end up driving him around the route and he’d toss the papers onto the driveways.
That same son still is angry for making him work at McDonald’s before he was 16, when it was allowed. But I figured if I had to work for spending money, so should he and working never seemed to harm him.
How things change, and not always for the better. But we manage to find a way to live with it.
As an interesting side note, I worked for nearly 44 years for The Beacon-News as an apprentice printer, photographer, and reporter, and never once delivered the paper. There was no one in my family that could pass the route to me, so I settled for the Chicago papers.