Who has the worst job in America? I don’t have any factual information to back it up, but if I had to throw one out there, I would say the poor souls who have to make a living doing surveys on the telephone would rank pretty high, or low on the list, depending on how you looked at it. I should have known better, but the other day, I answered an 800 number just out of curiosity. The young interviewer wanted to know how I was going to vote and asked me the standard demographic questions, and then he asked about my education. Did you get a college degree? Yes, I did. Well, how would you like some help paying off your student loan debt? Well, I’d like some just fine, but I already paid it off about 40 years ago. I see, well, how long have you been in your current field. Well, I started in my current field in the early 1960s. I then heard a click, then silence, and then the dial tone. My guess is at that point, I was eliminated from the survey. I had, however, told him the truth. In my current field, I use a computer to write for a newspaper. In 1963, I used a bicycle with a big basket on the front handlebars and a bb pistol to handle the neighborhood dogs as I delivered the news. So, I’m in the same field, right? I think every young American boy with dreams of entrepreneurial glory ought to have a paper route. The first thing it teaches you is how to establish your goals and objectives. In those days, my goal was to have enough money on Saturday afternoon to buy a new plastic model kit of the latest Air Force fighter jet at Bailey Brothers. I would do this after watching the double feature at the Dixie Theater. Then, I would go over to Stewarts Jewelers to purchase the new Elvis 45 record in order to know all the words to the new hit song before school on Monday. Now, you can see the level of planning and organization and preparation that is going on here, and the amazing thing is that we did it all back then without “Venn diagrams” or “bubble charts” or “top-of -mind thinking”. Something else you learn with a paper route is pacing and self-preservation. My route had thirty-six customers. On a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, it wasn’t too bad, but when that Atlanta Journal-Constitution truck pulled up outside our house in the wee small morning hours of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and especially on Sunday and dropped all the papers for town, it was “all hands-on deck” to get my papers stuffed, rolled, rubber banded and ready to load on my trusty bike from Western Auto. If anyone remembers a Sunday Atlanta Journal back in those days, you know they were about the size of a medium Christmas turkey. You had to stop the bike and use both hands to throw one like in an Olympic competition. So, when you had 30 to 40 of those papers loaded on your bike, you were dangerously playing around with all the laws of nature, balance and physics to make it up and down the hills of Church Street, Pine Street, Racetrack Street and West Main. All it took was one new pothole in the pavement or one sneaky, lowdown, trouble-making dog lurking in the shrubbery to create disaster in the sleepy, pre-dawn streets of Swainsboro. Those episodes were rare, and I only remember one painful catastrophe. It happened on a very rainy Fall Day. One of this town’s finest men in education, Principal V.E. Glenn didn’t get his paper that morning, and after school my mother drove me to his house to deliver it. Mr. Glenn had a big, fine bird dog named Dooley. I knew Dooley, and he knew me. There was only one problem. Dooley didn’t know it was me underneath that yellow rain suit bringing the newspaper. He strongly objected to this yellow trespasser coming into the yard and firmly latched on to the posterior portion of this young paperboy in a manner resembling a beartrap. Fortunately, the thick rainsuit absorbed most of the bite. The paper was delivered, the bruises healed, and Mr. Glenn saw to it that Dooley and I remained friends. Sadly, today, paper routes may be a thing of the past, but they were a great learning tool back in my day. Part-time jobs, after-school work, whatever name they took, were part of the passage out of childhood and onto bigger and better things. They set a course and influenced so much of later life. Some jobs taught you skills, some taught responsibility, some taught understanding, and some just taught you a little more about the world and how it works. Whatever the lesson, the one thing that came through was the understanding that the value you gain is the reward for the effort you make. That lesson is still basic and relevant, even today. Priceless.
