Most of our daily customers sent payments directly to the newspaper’s office, but there were always a handful of families from whom I needed to collect. The reader can decide if $6.30 seems like a lot of money to pay each week for a local paper in the early 2000s, but for at least a few households in my neighborhood, it really was. One middle-aged ne’er-do-well used to scream (think full-throated) every time I would knock on his door. Once, when he owed me nearly twenty dollars, he reached into his pocket and found only two dollar bills and about six wooden tokens from a tavern downtown. I did not take the two dollars or the tokens. Eventually, his brother, who lived in Milwaukee, made stopping by my parents’ home to settle up with me a routine part of his visits to his brother. For another house, I learned to time my collection stops to the rhythm of the family’s paycheck cycle.

I do not think paper routes such as mine would have troubled Pope Leo XIII very much, but there certainly are those who criticize newspapers for their traditional reliance on the labor of the young. Those critics may have a point, but they did not get to see the way my family always worked together to get the papers delivered. Even in those ugly and awkward teenage years when my brother rarely spoke to me, he and I worked together just fine in order to carry out the day’s work. We subbed for each other when we were sick, and our parents always helped us with the shopper paper, the Sunday daily, and the difficulties of getting the papers delivered by 5:00 p.m. when we had school and sports practice immediately afterward. It was not a highly lucrative operation, but we did it as a family, and I would not trade the memories. Even our little sister used to walk alongside me from time to time. Once I swatted an aggressive dog with a paper, fearing that it might bite her. The owner’s neighbor saw me hit the dog and came out to administer one of the finest scoldings I ever received. I would do nothing differently. 

My friends loved the routes. We were a restless lot, but every day there were papers to deliver at the Schweigl household, which meant that we had a dependable source of something to do, which seemed an awfully precious commodity in those days. The weekend routes, in particular, were a hit among my chums, since it meant walking around at night without any adults keeping an eye on us, as my parents would stay home if there were enough of us to carry all of the papers at once. 

Though the word “neighborhood” often seems anachronistic these days, I literally knew the name of everyone in mine: either their names were on our list of subscribers, or my mother (a postal worker in good standing with the Church and the USPS) would fill us in about who dwelt in the few houses that did not get even the free shopper. My father, a police officer, gave me strict instructions about which customers on my route I was not to speak with (a prohibition that proved impossible on at least two occasions, including once when a multiple felon from the neighborhood rode his bike alongside me, chatting for nearly a full hour during the early morning). I duly noted where all the pretty girls on the route lived (which, alas, did me no good), and I also learned which folks were lonely. One widower spent half an hour one summer morning showing me his fleet of three classic cars. Another customer, in his early nineties when I began delivering, was almost entirely blind. I do not know what he did with the newspaper once he had it, but every day he made what appeared to be a long, difficult walk from his chair to the front door to retrieve it. He was memorably friendly every time we spoke. When he died his son sent me a check for ten dollars.