He is twelve. He has been a newsboy, off and on, for 7 years. He delivers by bicycle. After school each day he works his paper route for about an hour. He has 69 customers.
I like my work. You know a lot of guys on your route. If you are nice, they tell everybody about how nice you are and they would pass it on.
For this old man I put it on the table, he’s a cripple. But for the guys who can walk, if I have to put it on the porch for everybody, it’d take me about two hours. This one lady, she lives about thirty yards from the street. I just throw the paper. She came one day and started to bawl me out cause she got a box. You gotta go up this alley, turn around, and go to the box on the side of the house. It takes about a minute. If I had to do it for everybody, I’d never get done.
You can get a good job as a salesman, like selling encyclopedias and stuff in your later life. I would, because you would get a lot of money.
I like to have money. I spent $150 this summer. On nothing – candy, cokes, games. We went to McDonald’s a couple of times. I just bought anything I wanted. I wonder where the money went. I’m like a gambler, the more I have, the more I want to spend.
But you mistrust people, you mistrust your customer because they don’t pay you sometimes.
You get mad at the people at the printing corporation. You are supposed to get 57 papers. They’ll send me 47 or else they’ll send me 67. Sunday mornings they get mixed up. Cliff’ll have 10 or 11 extras and I’ll be 10 or 11 short. That happens all the time. They make all these stupid mistakes at least once a week. I think they are half asleep or something. I do my job, I don’t see why they can’t do theirs.
Many of my customers cuss me if they don’t get their papers just exactly in the right place. This one guy cussed me up and down for about 15 minutes. I don’t want to repeat what he called me. All the words just up and down.
I was so mad at him. I hated his guts. But I kept my mouth shut, cause I could lose my route.
A lot of younger customers have had routes and they know how hard it is, how mean people are. They’ll be nicer to you. They tend to tip you more. And they don’t blab all day long. They’ll just pay you and smile at you. The younger people frequently offer me a coke or something.
Once in a while I come angry, most of the time just crabby. Sometimes kids steal the paper out of people’s boxes. I lose my profits. It costs me a dime. The company isn’t responsible, I am. The company wouldn’t believe you probably that somebody stole the paper.
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