The town I grew up in, Jacksonville Illinois has the Jacksonville Journal Courier as its daily publication for the citizens of the city. When I was growing up it was actually split up into two daily editions, the morning edition was the Jacksonville Daily Journal and the afternoon edition was the Jacksonville Evening Courier. At that time almost every resident in the city subscribed to either publication and I would guess that 75% did in fact subscribe to the evening edition because it was delivered about the same time that most folks were getting home from work for the day.
The Junior High that I was attending would occasionally get the publishers of the papers over to talk to the students of the job opportunities working for the Journal-Courier. Most of the jobs for teenagers was managing a route as a paperboy/papergirl for either the morning or evening editions of the paper. During one of these visits I put my name in the hat hoping to get the opportunity to have one of these coveted jobs. It was a matter of luck, where you lived in the city and what routes were available at any time. Within a few weeks I was contacted and asked if I'd like to deliver the morning edition, the Daily Journal. The route started a few blocks from my house but since it was a morning route I had to bike nearly three miles to deliver to nearly 100 customers. One of my other friends had the afternoon route in our neighborhood and his route was roughly 4 city blocks by 3 city blocks - that was the difference in density of the customer base for the two editions.
Anyway, the paperboy that I was taking over from lived about three blocks from my house and he had just started high school so the demands of the workload were taking its toll on him and he needed to focus on his studies. I rode with him for two weeks learning the ropes and also receiving a list of all the addresses of customers so I could take over as effectively as possible. Additionally other tasks that I learned from him was the weekly collection for paper fees - at the time, unless the customer "paid in advance" or PIA'ed with the paper company directly we had to go door to door to personally collect from each customer. On my route I had around 15 PIA's so I had to really buckle down and get out there to collect the fees. Additionally, I bought a paper bike from the newspaper company. These bikes were big and sturdy and came with two baskets in the back and a basket which provided support to a large burlap bag that went on the handlebars. They sold it to us for around $150 and we would pay them every week around $7 until it was fully paid off. Sunday editions of the paper were the largest and many times I'd have to make two trips to deliver all the papers. All told, when fully loaded I was carrying around 60-80 pounds of newspapers on my bike. No helmet, no elbow or knee pads - I just got out there and did it! At the end of the financial week (Saturday) we had to perform all of the collections.
Same color and type of bike for my paper route.
November 4th, 1979 was my first day on the job and I was terrified! I woke up around 5am shortly after the newspaper company delivered the papers in two bundles on our doorstep. It was the Sunday edition and I had until roughly 9AM to get all the papers delivered before customers would start to complain so I had enough time. The process for delivery was as follows: Keep in mind this was a single-person operation....I had a large bag of rubberbands that I purchased from the paper company that would use to wrap up the papers into rolled up bundles that resembled a baton and as I wrapped up the papers I would toss them off into a large pile that I would eventually then pack onto the bike. At first I had to use the address list provided to me but over the first couple of weeks I learned the route and knew every customer name and address from memory. Usually starting Thursday or Friday afternoon after school I would start my fee collections and usually around 10AM on Saturday I would go to the Newspaper office and reconcile my account. 95% of the time I had collected more than enough to pay the paper what was owed for customer accounts, my bike payments and supplies such as rubber bands and plastic covers for when it was raining. On the weeks where I fell short, they would simply add this to my next week's bill. I never got too far behind on this because I wanted to get paid, therefore I was very motivated to lean into the system to maximize my earnings. I would say that the weekly subscription was 80 cents, the paper charged me roughly 65 cents per customer per week so after receiving a 20 cent tip from each of my customers every week and after paying off my bike payment and paying for supplies I would net around 30-40 dollars a week for around 15-20 hours of work. This was like hitting the jackpot!
Over time the job became a bit mundane - I was 13 years old but I was committed to the job for the long haul for two reasons. The first one was that my friend had the sweet route that I really wanted - eventually I got it and also I remember clearly the first day of my job as November 4th, 1979 because if you remember your history, this was the day that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and when I would get down on my job I made a commitment to myself that I would keep the morning paper route at a minimum until they were all freed! I did keep this promise to myself and almost by fate after 444 days the hostage crises ended, my friend quit his afternoon route and I took it over and for a short time had both routes until my replacement for the morning route could be found.
Some of the best times of my childhood in Jacksonville were from this time. I was learning how to be independent and usually on Saturdays after I would pay the bill I would gather at the local pizza joint with some of my friends (we all had paper routes) and it was during the early days of video games so we would spend the afternoon playing games at the pizza joint, eat pizza drink coke and listen to music. We would all hang out until it was time to go home and I did this religiously for about a year! The pizza joint was Pizzan's Pizza and Pasta located in Lincoln Square Shopping Center but unfortunately it has been closed for a very long time. I believe that Dominos now takes up space where Pizzan's used to be. I remember they had the best pan pizza around and I'm sure that if I tasted it now it would most likely not live up to my sophisticated pallet but I choose to think of it as the bar for my pizza since and I'm not going to move off this perception! If after settling our fees at the Newspaper office we were really hungry we would go around the corner from the office to Leo's Pizza. Leo came from Sicily and his business still operates today. They have the best thin crust pizza on the planet and this has been verified many times since I was a kid growing up in Jacksonville. We make it a regular stop whenever we are in town.
As fate would have it, I eventually grew out of my paperboy job and moved on to other things in life, mostly girls, cars and a real job working at Hardees. If I could only bottle the happiness during this time and sell it I would be a millionaire!
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