DELIVERING "THE CITIZEN" Part I
DELIVERING THE CITIZEN
(JLR Note: this recollection will absolutely require supplements from Mike, Tom, Paul, Dave, Pete & Bob)
At one time or another all seven of the Ringwood brothers delivered Auburn’s local newspaper, The Citizen-Advertiser. Starting with Mike, who acquired Route 11 from (Rick?) Kadian who lived down the street, to Pete and Bob, who managed Route 14 on the other side of Owasco Street, we must have delivered hundreds of thousands of copies of that newspaper over the course of 15 years. Let’s do the math:
- 6 days a week (in the early days the paper was only published Mon to Sat)
- x 52 weeks a year
- x an average 100 subscribers
- x 15 years = 468,000
That’s a pretty big number, and the basis for countless stories. Vivid memories of lugging 100+ papers from Dill Street in downtown Auburn where the papers were printed, to the start of the delivery route on Owasco Street. All kinds of subscribers - most very nice, some ornery, others mysterious, lonely, friendly, old and young, good and bad tippers - an incredible range of people for us to cross paths with at such a young age.
Just as memorable, and just as good a source of crazy stories, were the combinations of brothers working those routes together. To his credit, Mike started it all. I wasn’t involved at the beginning, so I can’t remember how many years he managed by himself. I know that Tom would help him out from time to time, and even do the whole route by himself when Mike couldn’t.
I became involved when Mike handed the route down to Tom and I became Tom’s helper. Here are a few of my memories.
The Route
For most of us, the job was Route 11 which started at the corner of Genesee and Owasco Streets and ended close to the corners of Owasco and Anna Streets, just a half block from home (which was pretty nice when it was below freezing and there was a foot of snow on the ground!). In between, we were responsible for all the houses on the south/west side of Owasco St., Mill St. (a very short half-block), Miller and Lizette Streets (right along the Outlet) and both sides of Owasco from Lake Ave. to Havens Ave.
In later years, Pete and Bob had Route 14 which followed the opposite direction. Starting near home on Owasco Street, it ended at Genesee Street and included several of the side streets along the way, like Bradford and Frances. Pete and Bob may have helped Paul or David on Route 11 when they were young, but for a short period of time, when they were still too young to have a route of their own, Route 11 was passed on to others. But, when Pete and Bob took over Route 14, we were back in the newspaper business!
Pete and Bob will probably disagree, and Paul and Dave may have the final say, but Mike, Tom and I know that Route 11 was much harder that Route 14 for many reasons. The most compelling: before even starting our deliveries, we had to pick up our papers (well over 100!) where they were printed downtown. It was only a half-mile walk, but it was up East Hill. Seriously, there were times the papers were so thick and heavy, both in number of pages and advertising inserts, that they didn’t all fit in the heavy cloth carrier bag that we used to carry them. I recall many days walking with 25 papers in my arms and the rest balanced on my back, completely bent over, looking like a pack mule.
The offices and printing plant for The Citizen were located downtown near Dill and State Street – before the loop road was built. We’d walk there from Holy Family and wait for papers to come off the press. On a good day the wait might be only half an hour, but typically it was closer to an hour, and much longer on days when the paper was big (many pages printed in two or three sections) or when the presses were down. During those waits, all sorts of nonsense went on as 10-20 teen-aged newspaper boys tried to kill time. I never had the guts to do it, but Tom (and I think Mike too) weren’t afraid to pitch coins in the alley beside the offices. The games were usually nickels, quarters and sometimes half-dollars (usually only on payday when paperboys were paid, in cash, by the newspaper and your “envelope” included the big, heavy Kennedy half-dollars). If a game included 4 or 5 players, and you were lucky enough to throw a few “leaners” that paid double, the payoff could be pretty high. Of course, so could the loss, and I wanted none of that!
Not wanting to lose money was one reason to avoid pitching. The other was getting on the wrong side of Dorothy (I should remember her last name) who was in charge of the paperboys. She would frequently come rushing out into the alley and tell us to knock it off.
On Monday afternoon, after spending the weekend getting payments from all the subscribers on our routes, all the paper boys would bring the money they collected to the office where Dorothy would recount it and subtract what we owed for purchasing newspapers in the first place. The difference was yours to keep. And it supplemented what the Paper paid carriers for the number of subscribers on the route, and the size of the papers (pages and inserts) printed that week. It was the paperboy’s responsibility to have coins ready for counting in the paper wrappers they gave us: fifty pennies to a wrapper, twenty nickels, fifty dimes, and ten or twenty quarters each to a wrapper. That made it easier for Dorothy to count. And God help you if one of your wrappers was missing a quarter, or a dime! Dorothy also had control of the room where all the paper boys waited for their papers. It was a dark room with a couple vending machines and several large tables with metal tops where you would count your papers when they were brought up from the presses. Before you left the building, you needed to make sure you’d been given enough papers. If not, it was great; you were able to yell, “Short!” at the top of your lungs and one of the young pressmen would have to come out and recount your papers to be sure you weren’t just trying to get away with more than you were supposed to. They were cool guys because they could count papers three-at-a-time compared to the two-at-a-time that we used to count.
I never gave it a thought at the time, but it must’ve been pretty interesting for Dorothy to look out on that room and see two young guys like Tom and me, still dressed in our Holy Family uniforms, alongside much tougher looking kids from the public schools on the west side of town. Funny, and perhaps nice, none of us seemed to notice the difference. And Dorothy didn’t treat anybody differently either. Except once that I recall. It seemed like a normal day. Perhaps the wait for the papers to come off the press was a little longer than usual, but I hadn’t noticed. I had climbed up on one of those metal counting tables, my back against the wall and my legs sticking straight out, just minding my own business, maybe even looking at a schoolbook. Out of nowhere, and completely unexpected, Dorothy had left her office, bought a plastic cup of Coke from one of the crummy vending machines (you remember, the machines that, if you were lucky, would actually drop a plastic cup, give you the option of ice or no ice, then mix the soda syrup and carbonated water to create one serving of soda), walked over to the table where I was sitting and put it down next to me without saying a word. Eyes raised, all I could do is say “thanks,” almost with a question mark attached to it, and I drank the soda.
I never pitched coins, but I do have this confession to make. I learned to swear at the newspaper office. It wasn’t deliberate. I didn’t do it consciously, that’s for sure (and Dorothy never would’ve bought me a soda if she knew). It just kind of sank in over time. You hear it often enough, especially from the poor kid who just lost five dollars pitching in the alley, and the next thing you know the papers aren’t just heavy, they are d**n heavy. And that kid who talks too much isn’t a big mouth, it turns out he’s full of s**t! Who knew?!?
I didn’t bring the swear words home, but every now and then I’d get some startled looks from my fellow 7th graders at Holy Family.
After the long trek from the newspaper office, past the Police Department on Water Street, through downtown and up East Hill, the best thing about Route 11 was the fact that it started with the Koon (sp?) Apartments. There you could put the carrier bag down and quickly unload about 15 papers. What followed was a long stretch with no houses to deliver to, overlooking the Owasco Outlet. On a lucky day, especially in the winter, if the timing worked perfectly and you had just finished with the apartments and started to walk that stretch, a city bus driven by none other than Bert Richardson would pull over and you’d hear “Get in Ringwood!” (Bert, who drove both city buses and the Holy Family grade school bus, was a wonderful man with a large family like ours. When I was in 1st grade and on crutches after surgery on my ankle, he literally carried me from the bus he was driving and deposited me on our front porch.) I doubt Bert realized how much I appreciated that short drive.
Papers Dropped Off
Fortunately, there came a time when someone at The Citizen decided it would be best to include Route 11 among those routes that had their papers “delivered“ to some starting point rather than require that they be picked up at the printing plant downtown. For us, those drop off points were close to the starting point on Owasco Street. The first spot was at the Atlantic gas station right at the corner of a Owasco and Genesee Street. That was then moved to the Shell gas station at the corner of Genesee Street and Fulton Street, only a block away from the start of the route. The final, and best, spot was at the Koon Apartments on Owasco Street, the very first stop for Route 11. From there you could distribute the first 15 or 20 papers; a very good way to start the day.
It was great, no longer having to trek up East Hill with a full load of papers. And, if we weren’t waiting in the cold and snow, there was plenty of time to enjoy ourselves, even at those strange locations. We were rarely by ourselves. There were usually one or two other carriers whose papers would be dropped at the same spot. My best memories are those from eighth grade, waiting at the Shell gas station with the Syracusa brothers and another strange kid named Michael Glaub. Paul and Dave were helping me in those days, so there might be six or seven of us horsing around for about an hour between school and getting the papers. (Today, I suppose someone would argue it was terrible to have us hanging out, literally, by the bathrooms at a gas station. But we never gave it a thought.)
A part of our routine when Paul and Dave worked for me is that we’d cross the street and go to Carrol‘s where I would by them a soda before the papers were delivered to the gas station. Early on, that was just an informal routine. One week during the summer, Paul and Dave came to me and said they wanted a pay raise (I was probably paying them a whopping $1.00 per week), or they were going on strike. I told them, “Fine, go on strike” and delivered the papers by myself for a couple of days. (A better strategy would’ve been to go on strike in the winter.) Mom even tried to intervene. I don’t think the strike lasted for an entire week, but Paul and Dave did get a small pay raise (maybe another $.50) and, most importantly, the soda from Carol’s became mandatory! (I’ve always thought I could write a business book entitled “Everything I needed to know in business I learned on my paper route.“)
By the time the papers began to be delivered to the Koon apartments, the route had been passed on to Paul and Dave. So, I don’t have the stories to share that I’m sure they do. But I do recall a day when the presses must have broken down and the papers were very, very late. Because the Ringwood’s had managed Route 11 for so many years, all our customers knew who to call to complain. Most thought that we had simply forgotten to deliver their particular paper. After the 30th call to the house, mom simply picked up the phone and said “The presses are down, the papers will be late but don’t worry they’ll be delivered!“ At the end other end of the line was Mrs. Hoxie from apartment A-1 of the Koon apartments. She told mom to hold her horses, that the newspapers had been delivered and the boys could head out to start their route. I think Mrs. Hoxie really liked all of us. I approached her once to sell raffle tickets to fund our eighth-grade trip to Washington DC. When I asked her if she would buy a book of tickets, she’s very seriously said that she couldn’t because it was against her religion (first commandment; no false gods), but she gave me a dollar and said that I could buy a book of the tickets for myself. At the time I took her at her word that it was against her religion. And now I wonder whether she was just being nice and hoping that, perhaps, I would win the raffle.
PART II - Next Week
