Word had come that Jerry Hook had found an old picture that he thought I might find interesting.
“It involves the News-Banner.” he had said, “But I don’t have a story to go with it.” There’s an old saying that a picture speaks a thousand words. Let’s see how we do.
Jerry is a retired printer, woodworker and Model A enthusiast. He and his wife Sonja live in one of the condominiums on the Christian Care campus. They were going through a box of old pictures when he came across one he’d not seen in years. He has no recollection of who took it or how he came to own it.
It was either 1949 or 1950 he believes. That would have made him 11 or 12 years old. Someone apparently had asked about a dozen News-Banner paperboys to pose for a picture. He remembers all but one: (from left) Joe Rush, Dave Flowers, Max Micklitsch, himself, Bob Davis, Vernon Meyer (he’s not sure about the exact spelling), the one he cannot recall, Jack Fitzpatrick, Bob Shafer, Junior Steel and Dick Schmidt. The News-Banner was located on West Market Street at the time; that’s the back of the Montgomery Ward store in the background.
It is a picture of a bygone era, when having a paper route was part of growing up. Practically every young friend he had at the time also had a route at one time or another.
About ten years later, a similar picture could have been taken behind the building where the Decatur Daily Democrat was published. It could have included yours truly. I only wish someone would have done something like this. I can rattle off a list of names and wonder where they are today.
News-Banner routes were bought and sold in those days. Jerry began delivering a route on the far southwest part of town. Since his route was the furthest away, he got his papers first. When a route closer became available, he sold his route and bought the other. He would repeat that a year or so later but sold that one before starting high school.
The Hook family grew up a block east of the old Heyerly grocery store on South Main. He remembers during the cold of winter, stopping at Harvey Johnson’s filling station at the corner of Spring and Main (present site of CVS Pharmacy) and getting warmed up by the pot-belly stove before finishing his route.
Paperboys were responsible for collecting from each customer. At the time, he believes the weekly cost was 25 cents. Then he would have to pay his bill at the N-B office. If a customer didn’t pay, he still had to pay that bill, although he never recalls being stiffed.
“Some of them were harder to collect from than others,” he recalls. “It seems like those people on Cherry Street were the worst,” he adds with a chuckle.
His memories include the noisiness of the News-Banner’s back end — the clanks of the linotypes, the clunk-clunk of the press when it would be fired up. And the camaraderie of the carriers.
“That Junior Steel,” he says, “he was always patting his head and rubbing his tummy, so he had to do that for the picture.” He chuckled at the memory.
My memories are oh, so similar. The room where Decatur newsboys gathered was called the “bullpen.” Like the Bluffton boys, we would pitch pennies in the alley and it was not unusual for a couple boys to get into a scuffle of sorts. I may have, from time to time, expressed an opinion someone objected to. Imagine that. That old press was noisy, too. The man who managed us was Norb Bleeke, a rural mail carrier who did this every day after completing his route.
Perhaps my most poignant memory is delivering my papers on Nov. 22, 1963. It was a rainy evening, the papers were later than normal as the editors rushed to get the most up-to-date news from Dallas. People were often waiting on their porch for their paper.
We bought and sold our routes as well although, like Jerry, I cannot remember how much I paid for and sold the route I had. By the beginning of the 1960s, we collected 35 cents a week and I think I may have been billed for 27 cents, giving me an eight-cent profit per customer, assuming I was able to collect that. Jerry remembers having 125 customers; I think maybe I had about 70 or 80. So the math says I might have made $6 or $7 a week plus tips, which of course were pretty good around Christmas.
Fast forward another 20 years. I was getting into management at that Decatur paper. Norb Bleeke was still there. I think we may have been charging $1.25 per week by then. The routes were no longer being bought-and-sold but there was always a waiting list of young boys — and now girls— who wanted a route. But Norb and I watched that list diminish and then disappear and then had to begin advertising and going to Decatur schools to recruit.
We began to transition how people pay for their paper from “carrier-collect” to “PIO” — pay-in-office. Part of that was because carriers were having an increasingly difficult time collecting. People were hard to find at home, wouldn’t answer the door if they were and carriers were “getting stuck” by their customers with increasing frequency. Those difficulties made it even more difficult to recruit young people.
I remember complaining about that to my father during one of our Saturday breakfasts we shared after he retired. “These young kids don’t want to work, they don’t want to go out and collect,” I grumbled. He could only laugh.
“You obviously don’t remember,” he said, “how I had to practically kick you out the door on Saturdays to go collect your route.” Ouch.
When I came over to the News-Banner in 1997, we were amidst the same transition. A number of subscribers insisted they wanted to continue to pay their carrier but that became less and less possible. I am sure we lost several subscribers when we finally forced them to pay-in-advance at the office or via mail.
We couldn’t possibly take this picture these days, but that’s not because the News-Banner is now distributed via the mail. We have not had young boys and girls with a canvas bag slung over their shoulders for years. And we are not unique — I know of no other newspaper that has any kind of cadre of youth carriers. The exact timetable I do not recall, but it became something adults began doing when young people either had too many other demands on their time or they no longer needed to earn their spending money.
“If I wanted to have any money in my pocket,” Jerry Hook remembers, “I had to go out and earn it.” The same was true of his friends (including the Fitzpatrick boy, Jerry notes, whose father was president of the Old First Bank).
Jerry used some of his money to buy a new bicycle. He remembers the day he got it and the N-B’s owner and publisher Roger Swaim noticed it (Jim Barbieri once told me that he would often go back and talk to “the boys,” something he learned from Roger), he took Jerry over to the Western Auto store and bought him a basket to put on it to help hold his 125 papers.
One of my mantras is “Never say ‘never’ — that’s an awful long time.” But I think it’s safe to say we will not likely ever see this scene again, when young boys gathered daily to pitch pennies and joke around and sometimes get into a tiff while waiting to get their papers and make their daily deliveries. It was a rite of passage, something many, if not most boys did. We learned valuable lessons about responsibility and customer service.
I could go on — and on. Jerry had some other memories and so do I, and I’d thought about calling my friend Bruce Miller. Bruce and Terri’s three boys delivered the News-Banner in their northside neighborhood for a number of years. I’m sure they would have some stories as well. However, I see I’ve used up my thousand words. Indeed, this is about No. 1,390. Perhaps that’s because it’s a pretty good picture. It tells a pretty good story.
miller@news-banner.com
