paperboys

Every afternoon, my youngest sister heads into town to pick up a bundle of newspapers. Sixteen people await her arrival each day with the local news, printed and delivered from the county seat.

She is the last remaining member of an informal guild that has been operating in my hometown for over fifty years: the paperboys.

I can remember delivering newspapers with cousins, sometimes on their backs, sometimes by their sides. I often accompanied a friend in junior high on my bike. The paper route once seemed to be a right of passage for kids in town: everyday they headed into the streets in force, crisscrossing along the avenues and sidewalks with their trademark delivery bags with the blaze orange strap. Living outside of town, I sometimes felt excluded from my peers and once tried to get a route for myself. The newspaper denied me one, due to the lack of customers in my neck of the woods.

A few years later, my ambitious little brother made the same request and backed it up with five new subscribers. He inherited an already-existing route, just on the edge of town and his five new patrons were tacked on to the end of it. After a few years of service and garnering even more subscribers, he passed the route on to our younger sister, who likewise bequeathed it to the last sister.

Over the last ten or eleven years, the route has lost some customers and changed shape. Along with it, the number of paper carriers in the town diminished until only one was left. And she delivers only two papers within the town proper. The rest of the peddlers have been replaced with coin-operated boxes placed on a few corners and circulation of the newspaper in Houtzdale has dropped to a couple hundred.

I can’t believe that such a quintessential small-town institution has become a novelty in my hometown. Where are the kids going to get their pocket money? How will they be able to afford penny candy and comic books? And more importantly, who is going to raise the town’s collective blood pressure?! There’s no longer a reason for the elderly to save their pennies, or sit expectantly on their porches at 3:30 awaiting the arrival of news that is “stale by now, for crying out loud!”

Soon, my sister will grow out of her paper route, too. Those customers out here on the outskirts that don’t just fall off will revert to getting a delivery by truck, which will throw their orange-bagged, rolled-up paper along the street. People will have their news and kids will have their afternoons free, but one more vestige of small-town community life will be cast to the shoulder of the highway, just like the newspaper.