I was not an outstanding paper boy.
Yes, I did the job faithfully. I rose early on all manner of 1950’s Iowa mornings, ventured forth on my balloon-tire bicycle to the corner of 8th and Main in Grundy Center, Iowa (pop. c. 2,500), and stuffed my allotted number of Des Moines Registers into the canvas bags fastened with bailing wire over the Schwinn’s back fender.
During the several the years I delivered the Register, mine was the shortest route in town. Despite our route boss’s best efforts - a man whose name (sounds like “Mr. Euwin”) I still remember because he told us “You ‘n’ me are friends,” which sounds pretty creepy 60 years later) - despite his attempts to bribe us with valuable prizes and an annual summer watermelon feed, I was never very enthusiastic about knocking on strangers’ doors to ask them if they wanted to subscribe to the big city daily, especially when their response was likely to be, “No, we get The Grundy Register every Thursday, and that’s all we read.”
Saturday morning collecting was also a chore I didn’t enjoy, but I did it and put a few dollars each week into my Farmer’s Saving’s Bank account. I kind of liked that, though even then amassing large sums of money was not a goal of my existence. Besides, I usually lost newer customers as soon as the “deal” they’d been offered to get them to sign up ran out. I resented trying to collect my 50 cents from such short-timers, knowing it would be my last.
But I loved delivering the paper itself because by the time I got home from my morning ride around the north side of town I had read the entire front page of the Register as well as the top halves of the first pages of all the other sections. (I learned that I could read much faster in the dead of winter than on a balmy spring morning.)
My route being short, I had little need to hurry through my deliveries, and as I slowly walked from my bike to each house to place the paper carefully inside the storm door or in the mail slot, I learned a whole lot about the world beyond Grundy Center, and Iowa even. I was first in my house to know that the governor of Iowa had been killed in a car crash and that Sputnik had flown off into space and all kinds of other momentous things. If knowledge is power, I possessed it, and anything that would hinder my acquisition of knowledge - such as a longer route - was not to be sought.
Of course, my dalliance at signing up new subscribers is one reason that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is rumored to be about to stop daily publishing and go to, say, three days a week. If only I’d found more new customers and built a bigger base!
Whether or not part of the fault is mine, I am devastated at the thought of Cleveland joining the growing ranks of cities that do not have daily newspapers. Yes, the world is changing. I check on-line news updates regularly through my day. My two adult children do not get the daily papers of their respective cities...and they don’t have land lines, either. They witness their parents slide deeper and deeper into cultural irrelevance.
But to be able to pick up, to touch, to linger over a daily newspaper! To wonder why a person who is willing to sign his or her real name would write such a stupid letter to the editor! To ponder the deep meaning of Doonesbury and predictable ordinariness of Marmaduke! To learn what the Indians/Browns/Cavs must do to win next season! To read dueling perspectives on a controversial issue right next to each other on one page and imagine what would happen if those two writers ever talked together! To be shocked by a scandal gradually unfolding headline by headline one day after another, or to be inspired by a columnist’s tale of unrehearsed kindness! To save “Kennedy Assassinated in Dallas” for your posterity and to stare at photographs whose stillness is destined to seal their moment in national consciousness forever! To know how to fold the paper so you can read it on the bus or subway! To see what’s at the movies and who’s preaching at First Pres and what charity benefit everyone who is anyone attended last weekend and who tried to shoplift what from Kohl’s the week before and who died ... the daily newspaper is a treasure trove of culture’s sublimity and silliness all in one fragile, but preservable, package. It will be missed, if not by my children, then by generations after them who will have to try to figure out how to “read” some antique flash-drive or floppy disk found in deceased parents’ attics.
Meanwhile, a new edition of The Grundy Register is printed and published each week as it has been since I can remember. It no doubt faces its own set of challenges, but perhaps it’s one of those icons always to remain beyond changing. All politics is local; and in the end, so is all news.
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