After Dad moved out, we (my mom and my younger brother) had to downsize into a smaller house. After living in Samarkand in a five bedroom, four bathroom, we ended up in a three bedroom, one bathroom on the “glamorous” Westside, as my mom called it, on Mountain Avenue.

It was the summer of 1976, and my brother and I got to know the neighborhood by riding our bikes all over the place. Harding Elementary School was right across the street, and a lot of kids hung out there during non-school hours. There was handball, swings, basketball, four square, and a lot of pavement instead of grass. This was ok because we liked to skateboard and there was plenty of room to do that.

Mostly it was boys who hung out at the school, and I noticed that a few of them were there every afternoon around 5 p.m. They all had big white canvas bags lying next to their bikes. The bags turned out to be for newspapers, as each of them had a route with anywhere from 50-100 customers.

I thought that sounded fun, so I signed up to be a paper girl. Every day except Sunday 72 papers would be delivered around 3 p.m. and I was supposed to have them delivered to the houses on my route by 5:30. I would sit on my front lawn, fold the papers, stuff them into the bag, then slowly lift the bag over my shoulders so I had a protrusion of papers in front and in back of me. It was pretty slow going for the first 20 houses or so, but then the load would lighten and I would twist the bag around so I could take papers from the back.

The worst part of having a paper route was collecting the monthly fee. Here I was, a 12 year old girl walking the neighborhood at night with cash in my pockets. Besides the obvious danger, doors were often answered by elderly people who could not come up with the $3.75 fee and would ask me to come back another time. Needless to say, homework did not get the attention it should have.

It took about five minutes to collect from each customer so with 72 customers the minimum amount of time it took was about six hours. The News-Press would send me a monthly bill, so I would collect what I owed and hope that every other customer would pay me because that was where my profit lay. I am sure there were more than a few customers who knew they could just keep sending me away and eventually I would give up.

Sometimes the other carriers and I would have races that we would plan during school (we all went to La Cumbre Junior High). We all received our papers within 15 minutes of each other since we all lived within a few blocks. It would have been a funny sight to see from the air: four or five newspaper carriers racing around the neighborhood trying to deliver papers as quickly as possible. Whoever got to the schoolyard first was the winner. There were probably a lot of newspapers in bushes on those days.

On Sundays the papers had to be delivered by 7 a.m. Once in a while my dad would show up and help me pile the papers into his BMW 2002. It had a sunroof and I would stand on the passenger seat with my upper body sticking out of the sunroof. He would hand me papers and I would throw them from the car. That was always fun. Then he would drive me home, drop me off, and I would go back to bed.

I believe I only had my route for about a year. My mom still lives in the house on Mountain Avenue and I can still remember which houses were my customers. Some I can still remember their names, or the stories they insisted I listen to as I waited on their front porches while their spouses rustled up $3.75. But I will save those for another post.