Newspapers: The Lufkin Daily News and The Houston Chronicle

I have always loved newspapers. Paper newspapers. They are so delightful, filled with all sorts of stories, news, information, and images. The feel of the paper, the smell of the ink, all terrific. Moreover, way back when I got out of the Air Force I thought about becoming reporter. I even took a few classes at Angelina College but got all wanked out with religious shit and quit going to school. Stupid me. But anyway, I love newspapers. On more than one occasion I have thrown papers or delivered them to paper boxes on a route in Lufkin, in Nacogdoches, and in the Corpus Christ metro area.

There’s no money in carrying newspapers, not even back then when most of the people in town took one. Carriers were paid a percentage based on the number of papers delivered. It was a sub-contract job with no hourly requirements, just get the paper out as soon as possible. The pay usually amounted to the average minimum wage per hour, sometimes more and sometimes less. Paper carriers do it for a side-hustle or second job, as something to supplement retirement or other income, or just for fun. I did it mostly for fun.

The first time I looked into throwing a paper I talked to the guy doing the Houston Chronicle in Lufkin. I rode with him and decided the time was just not right for me. This was way back in the seventies. I don’t remember when. Later on, however, in 1976 I got a route for the Lufkin Daily News. It was a fairly short residential route. I didn’t make a lot of money but it was fun. I discovered what a pain in the ass a newspaper route is too. I loved doing it and loved being out at the ungodly hours I had to work but the seven day work week was difficult. Also problematic was finding a time to sleep.

As I sit here I can’t remember where that first route was I completed. Somewhere in the city of Lufkin. I do remember having a hard time getting sleep. Once I was in a service at First Assembly of God, sitting next to my then-girlfriend, when the cups and crackers were distributed for Communion. I had gone from my route to the church for the service and I was exhausted. When we leaned our heads over for prayer I fell asleep and dropped the communion cup. The sound of that tiny cup hitting the concrete floor echoed all through the church. I’m quite sure it generated plenty of laughter later but that time was supposed to be solum. Bad me. My girlfriend shared her little cup with me. How embarrassing. It was all part of being a paper carrier.

I had the paper route for a few months. It wore me down. I decided to try my luck finding work in Dallas so I left the job and went to Dallas. I wound up spending what little money I had for a cheap room and cheaper food. Have you ever lived off cucumbers and french bread? I did. No work there so after a week I returned to Lufkin.

Many years later, when I was studying at Stephene F. Austin State University, I looked into doing a paper route for the Houston Post. Back then the Post was growing and increasing readership all over east Texas. It was the first newspaper to publish with the front page full color. It was a terrific paper and I loved it very much. I was sad when I heard it sold out to The Houston Chronicle (the enemy!) and ceased publication. Anyway, I got a route in Nacogdoches in communities to the west of South Street and North Street, houses and apartment complexes. My route was all rural, throwing the paper. It took about three hours. Our car at the time was a little black Mazda with big windows that made throwing the paper easy.

I had some fun times throwing the Post. It was cool to be up so early, before most people wake up. I picked up my papers around three AM or so. The distributer had an automatic binder so my papers came rolled and banded so that made things simple. I piled my three hundred or so papers in the car and headed out. Only the Sunday paper which was too thick for the machine I had to fold and bag as I went along. That was a bit more work.

There were a couple of interesting episodes as I worked that route. Often I was drowsy while I went along tossing papers. One of my stops was in front of a four-plex apartment. I threw the paper over the top of the car and it would land on the sidewalk. When I saw that it was there I moved on. One day, however, I pulled up there about half asleep and tossed the paper. It never came down. I was a little surprised. I tossed another paper. It didn’t come down either. That was weird. I tossed a third paper and it didn’t show up either. I sat there imagining all kinds of things, even that a giant bird was over the car snatching the papers from the air. Like I said, I was half asleep.

After a couple minutes I said to myself, “this is bullshit,” and actually got out of the car to figure this thing out. I actually remember looking over the car for some bird or beast. Nothing there. I walked around to where the paper was supposed to fall. No papers. I then looked around and saw what happened. The porch was a couple feet high with steps from the sidewalk. There was a row of planters along the edge of the porch. The tops of the planters were above eye-level when sitting in the car. It was simple. I’d thrown all three too hard and they’d landed in the planter. Mystery solved. I still laugh about that night.

There were several parts of my rout where I got out and dropped papers in front of the doors of apartments. At one stop I passed a mercedes as I walked along. Every night just for the hell of it I’d turn the little logo hood ornament sideways. Every day. The next night it was straight. I’m sure I drove someone absolutely batty! Maybe a little cruel but one of those things to entertain yourself.

One part of the route required me to put a dozen or so papers in a cloth bag that I hung around my neck with a strap. A typical paper-boy carrier. I walked through a complex where many college students lived. One Sunday I went around a corner and discovered a window bashed outward, glass all over the place, and blood on some of the glass. It looked like I barely missed the end of a great party!

The last thing I remember about that route was one night when I was tossing the Sunday paper and I thought I’d broken the radio antenna off of a truck. That was a large paper, and heavy. I whizzed it over the car to the drive but someone had parked a truck in the drive that night. Whack. I was sure I hit that antenna. I kept waiting on someone calling the Post and nailing me for it but nothing ever happened. I never saw the truck again.

My wife and I moved out of campus housing and back to Lufkin. I left the Nacogdoches route but went right to work in Lufkin. The man running the Lufkin area for the Post was the son of the man running the Nacogdoches route. I got a route down in the southern area of Lufkin, much of it in Crown Colony, a ritzy neighborhood. At the time it was THE place to live if you could afford it. That route was fun. The distributer did not have a folding machine so we had to fold and band or bag our papers. Small papers I banded as I went along unless of course it was raining. Rubber bands were cheaper than bags and I had to pay for both. On Sunday in Lufkin we had to do inserts. That was when the paper came in sections, like the main section, the Society and Sports section, or whatever else, and we had to lay the papers out on a table and put all the sections together. It was a tiring job and I had to do it for free since I only got paid for the number of papers I threw.

The only even during my Lufkin rout I remember was one night when I was driving my big old Ford Galaxie. I pulled up into a drive in Crown Colony, tossed the paper, and backed out. I didn’t turn quite enough and backed off the street and into a ditch. The land was wet so the car stuck. No cell phones or means of contacting anyone back then. I started walking, thinking I’d walk to a store with a pay phone or something. Then I passed a construction site. I looked around at the sight and found a long 2×10. I “borrowed” it and went back to the car. Then I jacked the car up, put the board under the wheel, supporting it with a stack of papers. It worked perfect!

My routs in Nacogdoches and Lufkin were paid according to the papers I delivered, a percentage. I was a sub-contractor, somewhat officially, but I failed to turn in those wages to the IRS. Many years later the IRS audited the paper contractor and came after me for taxes. I had to pay several hundred dollars. That was just wonderful!

Eventually my wife and I moved to Corpus Christi. We bought a little Dodge Ram 50, a quarter-ton truck. I learned the Houston Post was looking for a distributor for the Corpus Christi area. The Post had been coming on Sunday only and they wanted to expand to seven day delivery. The Post gave the full area to another guy but he took me on to work the areas north-east to south-east, from Portland around to Padre Island. It was a long route, maybe about fifty miles. I had no residential delivery, only boxes and stores. The trip took a long time as it began in Portland, went down and east to Rockport, back to Aransas Pass, over the ferry to Port Aransas, then down the state highway to Padre Island. It took an hour, which was bad, because it meant the paper got to stores and boxes later than the Chronicle which came in earlier. The route was a challenge from the beginning.

I picked up the bundled papers early in the morning in Portland. Then I started the route, dropping papers along the way at stores and paper boxes. One morning I went into Ingleside and stopped at a store to drop papers. A disheveled guy walked into the store and asked to use a phone. He said he’d hit a horse in the road. It happened on the road I was about to travel down. After leaving the store I soon came to the accident site. There sat a pickup with the whole front crashed in. A supposedly dead horse lay in the road. I swerved around the horse and heard my tires making an awful sound as I passed over a patch of horse blood. It was rather gross.

Sunday papers came in several sections and I had to insert them. I often got a friend of mine, Larry, to help. The Sunday paper came in the Bulldog edition on Saturday PM. Larry and I would grab up the bundles and find some place to park the truck and insert them. I usually pulled up under the awning of a closed gas station or something. The wind in Portland was more of a worry than occasional rain, though. We had to find a place to block the truck from the wind or the paper would wind up all over the place, blown by the wind.

When we got the papers ready we’d make the route. It was really rather fun, I thought. I had the route during Spring Break, which was a big deal then in Port Aransas. Hundreds of college kids were everywhere. In the little town that usually had no traffic we had trouble getting through for all the cars and people.

I had a few double-stack boxes that held a lot of papers. One of them was outside an HEB Grocery in Rockport. I usually sold all the papers in that box, apparently to Winter Texans. Winter Texans are people who have homes and lives up in the northern states but drive down to Corpus Christy and other areas in a motor home in the winter to get out of the cold. When the weather warmed up and the winter Texas went home that box was a total bust.

Like I said earlier, The Houston Post was the first newspaper to have a full color front page. They developed a fancy new paper box where I could unfold a paper and display the entire front page. It was beautiful. I spent time placing boxes in places along the route. Those fancy boxes did the trick. Then came the day when the Space Shuttle exploded, January 28, 1986. The Post had a full color, full page picture of the explosion. I sold every single paper I delivered that day.

For the first couple of months the Post gave us a discount rate for the paper so I made a few dollars per week, almost all in Quarters! I discovered that a Mexican peso works great as a substitute quarter. After the discount ended papers were more expensive and I started loosing money. My rout was too long. I looked around and found a couple of guys who were going to run the northern section from Portland to Aransas Pass while I went from Padre Island and back down to Port Aransas and Rockport. That would have put the paper in the racks ahead of Padre Island where lots of tourist stayed in condos. Unfortunately the guys didn’t show up. Their papers were waiting for me the next morning. I could not get in touch with them. I’d lost sales on half the route. It was frustrating.

After the debacle with the “helpers” and the increase cost of the paper, I could not afford to do the route. In the beginning it was at least covering my gas costs and a little more but later I was actually spending more time, effort and gas than I was earning. I had to quit the route. That really made me sad because I loved doing it. Crossing the ferry just at sunup when the water was so beautiful in the ship channel. But I could not keep doing it and just loosing money. I quit. The thing that pissed me off, though, was that after I quit the assholes who abandoned me took over the whole route. I hope they went broke!

In 2005 I took up a Lufkin Daily News route. It was a bit ironic the route was through the little town and community of Hudson, where I had twelve hellacious years and an area I did not like visiting. I took up the route, however, and it was fun. My wife and I had three kids we’d adopted at the time, the two we’ve raised and one who was older and who eventually just ran off. That’s a story for another time. My son started school in Central ISD the same year. I had to sleep weird hours so I didn’t get to see the kids very often. When they were out of school I often took them with me. I drove a little Dodge mini-van so they could lay out in the back and sleep some. We had fun.

The route was uneventful except for one particular day, September 23, 2005. Hurricane Rita came blasting through town with high winds and possibly a few tornados. I started my rout that Saturday morning in our new Jeep with my older daughter. The storm came in when I was about half-way through the route. Wind was blowing so hard I could not get the papers to land where they should. I gave up and went home. After the storm blew over I went out and tossed the rest of the paper. I swerved around obstacles and saw lots of damage everywhere. People were out cleaning up and were amazed I was taking them the paper. I heard one person say it was great to see something normal for a change.

I kept the route through the end of the year. Problems started developing with my son at school. He and his teacher were not getting along. I had to do something about that. I quit my paper route and took him on a trip down to Galveston for a couple days. We had some fun and I managed to calm him down and the rest of the year went better.

It’s probably nutty but of all the jobs I’ve had I think throwing a paper comes in a close second, just under truck driving. I was on the road moving around, not hard work, out in the brisk early mornings. I loved it. But alas, it was not to be. I suppose these days not nearly as many people take an actual paper edition. The pay sucked before, it has to be lower now if there even are delivery persons. I’d sure love to find some kind of job to be out like that again, if maybe not so demanding of time.

And that’s my newspaper adventures. More coming later!

Ted