THE PAPERBOY - A THING OF THE PAST    This column originally appeared on Wicked Local.  

On the third day of the power outage last week, I knew that there was one thing I could look forward to that did not require electricity – the Sunday paper.  The paper never came. 

I tried to blame it on the storm.  It was possible that my delivery person’s car had been crushed by a large elm.  Maybe their home had lost power and subsequently forced them to relocate to a motel in Malden for a few days.  Although I tried to take on an attitude of empathy, I couldn’t quite think of a logical reason why my newspaper could not have been delivered. 

When I was a kid (back in the Paleozoic Era), it served as a rite of passage to take over somebody’s paper route.  Taking on a paper route was an opportunity through which you could establish a working relationship in the community.  And if you were a bad paperboy, everyone in town would know it (at least that’s what I was always afraid of). 

We all had paper routes in my hometown when we were kids.  At one point or another everyone delivered either the Brockton Enterprise or, if you were a real go-getter, the Boston Globe.  The Enterprise was delivered in the afternoon, so it was a bit more palatable to spend your time after school delivering the Enterprise rather than before school delivering the more profitable Boston Globe.  (Some extremely ambitious youngsters took on both.)  When hired to deliver for either paper, you were given a large canvas bag to carry your newspapers.  Each paperboy usually found, however, that carrying that bag full of newspapers for your entire route was the equivalent of carrying another person with one arm.  It was better to strategically place stacks of papers positioned along your route and complete one section at a time.    

These days, you do not see kids delivering newspapers.  The paperboy is a societal casualty of the technological explosion that has made newspapers far less widespread and, to some degree, expendable, but probably at the expense of an institution that was a vital part of the generational maturity process. 

Paper routes were a job exclusively for kids, and when a youngster inherited a route they considered themselves lucky.  Today there is no comparable opportunity to what paper routes offered kids years ago.  Paper routes taught kids responsibility.  In my case, a hoard of paperboys waited behind the Village News general store in East Bridgewater anticipating the arrival of our distribution guy, Jim, who dropped off our stacks of papers each afternoon.   We also had to meet in the same location every Saturday morning in order to settle our payments for our routes.  Therefore, there was no such thing as sleeping late on Saturday morning.  Paper routes helped to get kids out of their bedrooms creating real world community involvement (not orchestrated by the schools) while also dealing with a variety of personalities on those routes requiring communication and salesmanship.  As a paperboy, you got to know the families on your route very well, especially on payday when most every door required a knock and an exchange of pleasantries and money, hopefully along with a well-earned tip.  Finally, having a paper route meant learning to independently earn, save, and budget money.  Those who were lucky enough to have paper routes were also the kids who managed to buy themselves small television sets, have the ability to buy pizzas at Stelio’s in the center of town, and proudly purchase their own bikes.

I can’t honestly tell you who is supposed to deliver my Sunday paper.  I don’t know the person and I can never seem to catch them to request that they drop off my paper sometime before 10:00 a.m. (which I happen to think is already four hours too late for a morning paper to be at my door).  I do know that by the time they have usually dropped off the paper (which is typically the exception rather than the rule), the time during the morning that I would have spent enjoying the paper is already over. 

Perhaps the existence of the paperboy is something from our immediate cultural past that we should aim to revisit rather than simply pressing forward with what we consider to be the progress of an increasingly automated and inhuman world. 

The paperboy is an overlooked cultural institution that might be worth holding onto, and I suspect that if we did I would also have my paper this morning.