When I was 10 years old, my older cousin was looking for someone to take over his paper route. The papers he distributed were to subscribers of The Pittsburgh Courier, a newspaper whose target audience was the African American community, and which was published once a week, on Thursday. Billy had his route memorized, and took me to each house a few times so that I could memorize each customer, too. Many of the details of those days — which were brief — have slipped through the ragged sieve that is my mind, but I remember well the rolling, rubber-banding and Thursday morning slinging of those papers. (And the not-so-joyful collection of subscription fees, which were often promised for “next week.”)
When I got older, I took advantage of living close to Pitt Stadium, home to the University of Pittsburgh’s football Panthers, and the part-time home to the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers, who split their home games between Pitt Stadium and Forbes Field from 1958 to 1963. Pitt Stadium was on the Eastern edge of Terrace Street, a few blocks from my house at Terrace and Darragh Streets. I would walk down Terrace Street, pass Pitt Stadium, Presbyterian Hospital and Western Psych and head South toward Fifth Avenue, where the paper vendors were set up. The Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch had game-day rosters and other team information that fans needed; the paper was also an umbrella and seat mop on rainy days. I was twelve years old and I walked up to a grown man and told him how many papers I wanted; he wrote down my name, the number of papers I wanted, and gave them to me. I — along with other young people — sold those papers for five cents; I would receive two pennies per paper sold. When the Post-Dispatch raised their price to seven cents, I hawked my papers with imagination, crying out, “Getcher game day paper here! Five cents, and two cents tax!” People — mostly men — always had quarters, nickels and dimes, but few wanted to rummage for pennies. You got bigger tips when the paper cost 7 cents, as most people gave you the change from a dime.
I have ink in my blood; my first father-in-law was a pressman for The Pittsburgh Courier and taught me the rudiments of offset printing. (His father and grandfather were from Noblesville Indiana; his grandfather learned printing at the Indiana Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Knightsville Indiana, and taught his son the trade.) When I went on “press approvals” of catalogs I had designed as an art director for L.S. Ayres, I badgered press people with questions about the process as rolls of newsprint galloped across the printing plates. I was surprised to have been drafted into service for this publication, and an unexpected day off from my weekday responsibility for my two-year-old granddaughter recently, gave me an opportunity to volunteer to handle and deliver newspapers. Ethel Winslow and Paula Nicewanger, two of the three publishers of The Weekly View, have added delivery to their write, design and edit functions; I wanted to help them. I like to invest a task with a rhythm, the repetition of which I can turn into a routine, such as the reach, heft and sling of a job that can be done well. I counted out the required numbers of papers in the delivery van, and hopped out to plop them onto counters or into boxes. Paula and Ethel were gracious enough to allow me to interrupt their delivery routine and conversation and to grant me a throwback to my life in newsprint:
Slinging papers.