At Twelve, I Found a Faster Way to Deliver the Community News
When I was twelve years old growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, I already understood one of the basic facts of American childhood:
If you wanted spending money, you worked for it.
Ferguson was the kind of place where kids could roam neighborhoods, invent their own adventures, and find ways to earn a few dollars, which is part of why I still enjoy writing about growing up in Ferguson, Missouri all these years later.
During the summer, I mowed lawns.
During the winter, I shoveled snow.
Neither occupation was particularly lucrative.
I wasn’t above looking for other ways to make a few bucks, either. One of my more successful childhood enterprises was golf ball hunting as a boy’s summer job, which at least had one advantage over delivering newspapers: the golf balls didn’t complain when I failed to show up.
Mowing lawns meant pushing a mower around somebody’s yard in the Missouri heat and humidity. Shoveling snow meant freezing your rear end off while moving several hundred pounds of frozen water from somebody else’s driveway.
It was hard work for kid wages.
At some point, twelve-year-old Richard conducted what I believed was a careful analysis of the labor market.
There had to be an easier way to make money.
And that’s when I decided to become a paperboy.
Being a Paperboy Was a Real Job
Back then, newspapers mattered.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Globe-Democrat depended on paid subscribers, and those subscribers expected their newspaper to show up.
Rain or shine.
Cold or hot.
If somebody paid for a newspaper and it didn’t arrive, they complained.
If it landed in a bush where Grandma couldn’t find it, they complained.
If it arrived soaked by the rain, they complained.
And newspapers took those complaints seriously.
The problem was that I wasn’t delivering the Post-Dispatch or the Globe-Democrat.
Those routes apparently required something I had not yet demonstrated:
reliability.
My opportunity came from a free publication called the Community News.
Nobody Had Actually Ordered My Newspaper
The Community News was different.
People didn’t subscribe to it.
It was delivered free to homes and supported by local advertising. It carried the sort of hyper-local information community newspapers specialized in—school news, local sports, recipes, community happenings, and the decisions being made by people whose names you might actually recognize.
Some residents probably enjoyed getting it.
Others seemed to regard my arrival as a weekly delivery of trash they hadn’t requested.
That distinction would become important.
I was assigned a route and given a stack of newspapers to deliver.
This was going to be my new business empire.
No lawn mower.
No snow shovel.
Just newspapers.
How hard could it be?
The Dime Collection
What I remember most clearly about the compensation was going door to door periodically and asking people on my route for a dime.
Ten cents.
It wasn’t really a subscription payment because the newspaper itself was free. As I remember it, it was more like a voluntary contribution for the kid who delivered it.
Fortunately, I had one significant competitive advantage:
I had good manners.
Most people were nice.
A dime wasn’t much money, and apparently a polite twelve-year-old standing on your doorstep was difficult to refuse.
Some people gave me the dime whether they read the Community News or not.
Others had complaints.
“I didn’t get my paper last week.”
This presented a problem.
Because sometimes they were right.
I Have a Confession to Make
This is where the story becomes somewhat damaging to my reputation.
I hated that paper route.
I hated getting up and delivering the papers.
I especially hated doing it before school.
And I really hated doing it when the weather was lousy.
Eventually I discovered something very interesting about my route.
Near the beginning of it was a storm sewer.
A storm sewer had several advantages over the people on my route.
It never complained about where I threw the newspaper.
It didn’t care whether the paper was wet.
It didn’t require me to walk from house to house.
And most importantly:
It could accept an astonishing number of copies of the Community News at one time.
So on some mornings, my paper route became considerably shorter.
I would leave home with my stack of newspapers.
I would arrive at the storm sewer.
And…
delivery complete.
Then I went home.
Apparently My Customers Noticed
There was one small flaw in my distribution strategy.
Eventually I had to go around asking those same people for their dimes.
Most were still nice about it.
But occasionally someone would tell me:
“I haven’t been getting the paper.”
Imagine that.
At the time, I probably stood there looking appropriately concerned.
Today I can admit that the Community News circulation department had a serious problem in my neighborhood.
The problem was me.
I’m not particularly proud of this.
For years I’ve occasionally thought back on my brief career as a paperboy and wondered what it said about twelve-year-old Richard.
Was I rebellious?
Entrepreneurial?
An early pioneer in labor-saving technology?
No.
I was lazy.
There. I said it.
My Publishing Career Comes to an End
After all that effort—or lack of it—I collected only a few dollars.
That’s when I performed another sophisticated economic analysis.
This job was too much work for too little money.
So I quit.
My career in newspaper distribution was over almost as quickly as it began.
Ironically, newspapers would remain part of my life in other ways. My uncle Jack Rice was a feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and years later my own interest in writing would eventually lead me here.
But my first experience on the distribution side of the publishing business was not exactly distinguished.
The Post-Dispatch had Uncle Jack.
The Community News got me.
They definitely got the short end of that deal.
The Jobs That Taught Us to Work
Looking back, what strikes me isn’t only what I did with those newspapers.
It’s that kids routinely worked.
We mowed lawns.
Shoveled snow.
Delivered newspapers.
Raked leaves.
Washed cars.
Babysat.
Collected bottles.
It was all part of the same childhood world when kids could disappear into the neighborhood for hours with little more than the instruction to come home when the streetlights came on.
We weren’t building résumés or developing our personal brands.
We wanted spending money.
And somewhere along the way, most of us learned that money required effort.
In my case, the lesson took a little longer.
Mowing lawns was hard.
Shoveling snow was hard.
Delivering newspapers was apparently also hard.
And dumping newspapers into a storm sewer?
That was easy.
It just didn’t pay very well.
🗣️ Your Turn
What was your first job?
Did you deliver newspapers, mow lawns, shovel snow, babysit, wash cars, bag groceries, collect bottles—or invent some other way to make spending money?
And since I’ve already confessed, it’s only fair to ask: Did you ever discover a shortcut at one of those childhood jobs that you probably shouldn’t have taken?
Tell us your first-job story in the comments. Bonus points if you were an even worse employee than I was.
📚 Continue Exploring
Paper routes were only one part of growing up when kids had more freedom, more responsibility—and occasionally more opportunities to make questionable decisions.
⚾ The Games That Raised a Generation
Before childhood became scheduled and supervised, kids created their own games, settled their own arguments, and usually made it home in one piece.
🚲 How Did We Ever Make It to Adulthood?
Bicycle ramps, homemade contraptions, disappearing for hours, and the questionable decisions that somehow became treasured memories.
🪁 Kids Didn’t Need Batteries
When bicycles, baseball gloves, imagination, and whatever happened to be lying around could provide an entire day’s entertainment.
☀️ The Last Day of School Meant Freedom
Three months of summer once meant bicycles, neighborhood adventures, odd jobs, scraped knees, and very little adult supervision.
⚠️ Bunker Rule
I have confessed to crimes against newspaper circulation. The statute of limitations has presumably expired.
We’re swapping memories here, not conducting employee-performance reviews on twelve-year-olds from sixty years ago.
If you had a childhood job, tell us what you did, what you earned, what you learned—and especially what you got away with.
Laugh at my paperboy career all you want. Just remember: somewhere out there may be a former paperboy with a worse confession than mine.
📌 Bunker Notice
This story is based on my memories of briefly delivering the Community News in Ferguson, Missouri, when I was about twelve years old.
More than sixty years have passed, so some details—particularly exactly how and when I was compensated—have faded. I remember going door to door asking residents for a dime, but I won’t pretend to remember every detail of the paper’s delivery or compensation system.
What I unfortunately remember quite clearly is the storm sewer.
The American Time Capsule preserves memories like this because everyday childhood jobs, neighborhood newspapers, and even our less admirable decisions were part of growing up in another era.
To the residents of my old route who wondered where their Community News went: after all these years, you finally have your answer.