I AM A NEWSPAPER MAN AND BOY

I was a newspaper man from the time I was about ten or eleven years old. Of course, I was a paperboy before I was a photographer. That was in the fifties when the Post Register was in its downtown plant. The press room fronted on Capital Avenue and had big picture windows so you could stand on the sidewalk and watch them print the paper. I loved to watch that. I got my papers delivered to the Highland Market, across the street from our town’s minor league ball park, along with two other paperboys. The driver would drop our wire-tied bundles about 4 oclock each afternoon. We would open them and fold the papers. I preferred to roll mine into thirds and tuck the fold inside the edge to make a nice compact roll that would throw well, (which delivery was forbidden by “Huffy” Huffman , the circulation manager) or slip into a rural mailbox neatly. The papers would fit nicely into the green canvas paperbags, the kind that you put your head through so the papers hung in pockets, front and back, like a lumpy pancho. Then I would start walking. If you had a bike, which I sometimes did, and could find where your little brother left it last, you could drape the bags over the handlebars in a precise way, making sure they could not swing sideways and throw you off on your head. Then you were set to cover your route. Mine was to the north and west.

I had the worst route that the Post Register had to offer. It was mostly in a very low income neighborhood known euphemistically as “Duttonville” after the family that settled it back during the Depression. I suppose if you took the poorest of the Joad family from “Grapes of Wrath” and intermarried them with the po’ folk from Tobacco Road on the day before payday, and put them in shacks, basement houses and various home made move-ons, you would have a large chunk of my paper route. I delivered papers there for about a year and I think I collected enough to pay my monthly bill once in all that time... twice if you count the time I left off a zero by mistake. It seems like I paid the paper 3 cents per copy and collected 5 cents from my customers and it must have been a dime for Sunday... which I delivered on Saturday. It was 35 cents a week for six days, I remember that, and I can still multiply 35 by any number of weeks in a month without thinking.

I did have some good sections on my route, down near the Snake River that runs through town. Doc Reese had an elegant home overlooking the river there and the houses were pretty nice for a block or so behind him. Then there were a couple of blocks of pretty much blue collar families... and behind them, the poorer end of my route. I didn’t know it then but I learned that the gene pool requires some serious periodic maintenance that it sometimes does not get. I also learned some second hand lessons like what the interesting results can be when a person is related to themself by marriage. And then behind these folks on my route, one of my favorite spots in all the world, the City Dump. You could find some good stuff there sometimes!!!

It was on my paper route that I learned about some of the esoteric lessons that life has to offer a young boy. Things like what an old man with no teeth talks like when he is drunk on cheap wine... and how to avoid getting sprayed when he tries to explain which week you CAN collect for the paper. Things like what the DTs do to a person... (delerium tremens.. a medical condition brought on by excessive use of alcohol with symptoms consisting of seizures, hallucinations and a loss of control of all bodily functions....nice! You can look it up if you are interested.) I recall once I saw a painter who worked for my dad and who must have been nipping at the paint thinner or something, had an attack of the DTs and was lying on his back, shaking all over. There was a piece of sandpaper under one hand and his hand was shaking so violently that I was sure he was going to sand a hole in the floor before the seizure was over. Not a particularly useful thing for a 12-year old boy to learn but at least I discovered first hand there are things in life I did NOT want to be part of.

Yes, having a paper route was an interesting segment of my early education.

I suspect this memory was a bit later, probably junior high age when I was older and wiser, but I will include it here anyway. Off to the east of Bannock Ave were I lived, were the Union Pacific rail yards complete with a real roundhouse and gigantic turntable for turning the steam engines. I can remember clearly lying in my bed and listening to the sounds of switch engines and freight cars being noisily coupled and uncoupled all night long. And occasionally, the mournful sound of a lonely whistle moaning in the night as a night train headed for the mines of Montana. I remember standing beside the track, long after I was supposed to be in bed and watching the dim lights of the caboose slowly fade into the darkness and wondering what it was like to be on board the train and heading into the fascinating unknown.

But I digress....

Beyond the yards, over near the Yellowstone Highway, north of the stock yards, was Idaho Animal Products, a rendering plant of some sort where they took in all kinds of dead animals, diseased and not, road kill, most bloated with stiff legs thrust outward rigidly. There were also parts and pieces of animals, slippery piles of unrecognizable glop, you name it. Inside that concrete building, I can imagine, they skinned the carcases out, broke them down, sliced them up, flayed them off the bones and chopped them into pieces to be rendered for the fat and lard and...well, I have no idea what they did. I do know that when the wind was right and they were cooking, the smell would gag a maggot. Across the highway and a short distance away was Ray’s In and Out, a busy little drive-in of the day. I recall how pleasant it felt when my friend, Steve Elder and I had a little excess change in our pocket and would walk the mile or so over to Ray’s for a 30-cent chocolate shake or something. A nickel more for malt. In one of those aberrations in behavior, peculiar to young boys, we somehow developed a bizarre game for the trip back home. If the Animal Products was cooking and we were feeling especially silly, we would get our shake and drink it as we walked. We timed our return so we would get to the switch yard just about the time we finished the shakes. Then we would sit downwind on the tracks, enduring in the fetid aroma from the Animal Products and making jokes and telling teenage lies until we discovered who would vomit up their shake first. Great fun! It helped to win if you had a big supper.

I just had a thought. I wonder what we smelled like when we got home? Perhaps that would explain why it was so easy to persuade our parents to let us sleep outside in the yard all summer long?