I grew up in a middle-class family. We were not poor but we certainly were not rich. I guess you would say we were reasonably well-off because unless we chose otherwise, all 4 of us kids were able to have our own bedroom after my father refurbished the basement to include one other bedroom. I chose to live in that bedroom and in retrospect it was kind of brave of me to take on that role considering that I was two flights of stairs away from the rest of the family and there were certainly plenty of things that go "bump" in the night.
It was the 80's when I first started remembering being alive and my family was quite traditional for the time period. Only my father worked and I have no idea if he was well-paid or not. I spent most of my youth in a family that was "house poor" in that we always had a relatively nice house to the point where some of my friends thought we were rich but the other things in our life needed to be cost effective. There are 4 kids in my family, and my parents were not ones to just give us money when we wanted it. We got some sort of allowance but it was nothing much, something like a dollar or two a week. If we wanted more than that, we had to work for it and although this is probably illegal now it was perfectly ok for children to get part-time jobs even at the ripe young age of 8 years old. That was when I got my first job.
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The kid in that picture is not me and we had color photographs at that time. It is just more fun for me to pretend that it was 100 years ago.
Having a paper route was something that was quite common with the youth in the 80's and it was something that I would continue to do until my teenage years. It wasn't very difficult because the newspaper company handled all of the logistics right up to the last part and which point it was up to you to finish the job. Every day after school a stack of the amount of newspapers I needed for my little quadrant was dropped off on a corner near my house. Looking back it is amazing to me how much times have changed because in the years that I did this job, those papers were never stolen. They were always there waiting for me, rain or shine.
Mostly I would just do this job right there on the street corner and unwrap the stack of newspapers and then wrap them into "log" and tie it up with a rubber band then put them in the bags that attached to my bicycle. I then had a series of houses that I had to deliver to and I guess people really liked the news back then because almost every house subscribed to the delivery system. I would try to launch them from the sidewalk if possible but sometimes this would go horribly wrong if I overshot it because on a number of occasions the paper would end up on the roof of a house and there was no getting that sonofagun back down.
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The newspaper provider was aware that things like this were going to happen every now and then and this is why we were provided with a couple of extra papers every day. I didn't make these mistakes often but it happened. The idea was to get the route done as quickly as possible and every now and then I would have a "perfect run" where the bike never stopped moving and I nailed every single porch. In that regard it was a lot like a videogame and I would time myself and try to do speed runs. Some days were better than others and there were some days that I would just be off the mark the entire time and I would lose precious seconds every time I had to put my kickstand down and get off the bike.
Ideally, we wanted to get the paper right in the center of the porch but if you were a little bit off, that was ok. I was just a kid so it's not like the owner is going to come storming out of the house and kick my ass because I hit their screen door with a launched paper.
There were two things that could absolutely suck in this job of mine and that was rain an snowstorms. When these hit we were required to wrap each newspaper in a plastic sheet of sorts to waterproof the paper. This meant a much longer day for me because I could no longer wrap them on the street corner and had to first carry them home and do the deed indoors. The plastic-wrapped newspapers were also much less aerodynamic than their unwrapped counterparts so I would miss the porch far more frequently. In the snow there were other dangers such as black ice that would see me crash my bike and the fact that the sidewalks or even the streets would be difficult to navigate on my bicycle. One the worst snow days I would have no choice but to walk the deliveries and this took MUCH longer.
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It took twice as long to do this
This all took place around 3-4pm after I got out of school with the one exception being Sunday. Sundays always kind of sucked because that was the one day of the week where we had to do morning delivery. When I say morning, I mean butt o'clock in the morning, morning. Crack of dawn, before the light sort of stuff. Only newspaper deliverers, criminals, and the Dunkin Donuts guy are awake at that time. Even though I was a kid I didn't relish getting up at 4am but it had to be done. To make matters worse on Sunday the Sunday edition of the paper was 2 to 3 times the size of the weekday papers, so this meant a really heavy load some days.
I gotta hand it to my father because on the really bitterly cold Sundays in the depths of winter he would wake up along with me and my sister (who also had a paper route) and drive us on the routes so that his babies wouldn't freeze to death. Afterwards he would take us all to the local grocery store and we could get a donut of our choice. I preferred the bear claws.
Looking back this was actually quite a lot of responsibility for a young kid. Not only did I have to do this job rain or shine, sickness or health, but I also had to go around and collect the subscription fee from the customers each month. I guess we lived in a pretty safe area because I never got robbed nor did anyone else. I think that an 8 year old running around with sometimes several hundred dollars would be pretty easy prey for a criminal, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened to me. The only scary things that ever happened was this one dog that was kind of territorial and the older brother of a school friend of mine that liked to bully me when I brought the paper.
I think that having this job kind of helped form me as both a teenager and as an adult. I learned at a very young age that there are no handouts in life and if you want something like money, you are going to have to work for it. This was not a very high-paying job and at the end of a month with I would imagine about a total of 40 hours of work having been put in, that I would end up with around $50 payment for my work. I did an inflation calculation to put things into how much money that would equate to these days and it came out to around $150. That is a lot of money for a little kid to have all at once and I already know what I spent it all on. This was the arcade years so I probably gave almost all of that money to the arcade machines down at the local Dairy Queen while i ate an ice cream out of a commemorative plastic baseball cap.
I'm sure that jobs like this are outlawed in the States these days but even if they weren't it wouldn't matter since no one gets newspapers anymore.
I'm happy that I learned this lesson when I was young. It did me a lot of good as far as understanding earning money, probably made me less of a brat, and also kept me in good shape!
Did you have a job as a kid? If so I'd like to hear about it in the comments!