Treat your paper carrier good

Well, I hope you all enjoyed a great Thanksgiving Day.

Receiving the South Bend Tribune on Thanksgiving brought back memories of my days as a paper boy in Hobart.

There were about twenty of us, all boys in those days, that delivered the Chicago Tribune. We would all meet in “the office” to fold our papers and stuck off from there. We could always gage how difficult the morning would be by the number of pages the newspaper had.

We all were well aware that the newspaper on Thanksgiving had the most pages of any paper all year, and didn’t look forward to that delivery and we tried our best to fill our canvas paper bags to the brim without room to spare so that we wouldn’t have to make another trip back to the “office”. Of course, that made the first several papers that much more difficult to remove from the bag. Plus, we weren’t able to heave them with as much ease or with as much accuracy as we could on the rest of the days of the year.

I tried to be more accurate in throwing the paper with customers who didn’t give me a rough time about paying their bill on collection day. And of course, those who weren’t cheap when it came to tipping got the best treatment.

Please be good tippers to your paper boy/girl. They get paid just peanuts for their hard work.