I think all 3 boys had paper routes in Rockford or Springfield and Lou was the pinch hitter. We initially had afternoon routes in Rockford delivering the Chicago Daily News to about 30 customers. Then, because of sports, we switched to morning routes delivering the Chicago Tribune and Chicago American. A truck would drop off the papers in a bundle on our drive, and we'd get up at 5 or 5:30 to bring them in and fold them. This was a real art before the days of the plastic wrap and before we discovered rubber bands. You would fold it in thirds and then tuck the first two thirds into the last one and then smash it a bit to keep the seams tight. When the papers didn't have too many pages, they kept together pretty well when tossed. However, if the papers were bulky, or if you didn't fold them tight enough, sometimes they'd "open up" in flight and pages would be floating everywhere. Rubber bands saved the day.
After we folded the papers, we would place them carefully into a canvas carrier that would fit over your head and had front and back bags. In the winter, we'd walk our route and in the spring and summer we'd attach the bags to our bikes and ride. Sometimes dad would take pity on us if it snowed and give us a ride in the car, but this was rare. Disaster was when the canvas bag was loose and would get caght in the spokes of the bike and you'd fly over the handlebars!
The absolute worse part of being a paperboy wasn't the early mornings, or the walks, or the bad weather....it was collecting! Every week, we would have to go to every house on our route and collect the money owed us and then we would pay the paper route manager. We had a large metal ring which had cards for each customer and we would punch a whole for each week we collected from them. I hated this for so many reasons; hated asking anybody for money...hated wasting part of a Saturday morning doing it....and most of all, hated the mean people. The mean people were the worst. Sometimes, I would just skip their house because I didn't feel like facing them. All this did, however, was make the next week even worse yet because now they owed twice as much. This was clearly hell for a 10 year old kid.
Hit the nail on the head. The "Head Over Handlebars" technique was a favorite of mine. You could see it coming, but like an avalanche, you can't get out of the way soon enough. I always tried to kick the bag to prevent it form going into the spokes, but that only made it swing out and then back with a force- right into the spokes. Can you say "Hello sidewalk!"?
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