[MORTARDUDE]

I was just thinking back over my 40 years of work...I started helping out on the afternoon paper route when I was 13 or so, in 1961. I think the papers were 5c a piece. As I recall, we always got a lot of extras to sell and got to keep the nickel for each one. In those days baseball cards were in nickel and penny packs and you got one card for a penny and maybe 10 or more for a nickel.
Comics were 10c each until the mid '60s when they were 12c. I got suckered into helping another neighbor with the morning route several times in the summer. You had to get up real early and it was hell collecting because you had to do it every week. There were some folks who paid by the month too. It seemed people were always moving or were never at home. We devised all kinds of methods to mark mailboxes so we knew who got what paper,
figured out ways to catch people at home who were several months behind in paying for the paper, and working on our techniques to fold the papers so you could throw them better. I wasn't very good at that. The two kids who lived next door had mean parents. They didn't beat them or anything, but the older boy had to put the profits from his paper route in a mayonnaise jar and hide it in a culvert or his mother would take it away from him.
It still doesn't make sense to me. When there was a big story....like riots,
assasinations, space shots, wars etc., they would prints lots of extra papers, and sometimes special edition runs and the afternoon paper would have huge headlines, and very little real news. I still have a bunch of those...When I was in the 12th grade in 1965 - 1966, I was on schoolteam that had to memorize all the articles in the papers all week and then on Saturday go on TV and answer questions against another school..sort of like College Bowl used to be..Ours was called Quiz 'Em On the Air, and it was a lot of fun. It was hard work though. We won the first match and lost the second one. I took the girl that sat next to me
on TV to the Senior Prom. It was the last date I had for a long time. I was on the shy side..What were your experiences with your paper route ?

Larry