I’m not sure why I agreed to take a job without the promise of being paid. But when you’re thirteen, you don’t have much bargaining power.
A modest income was promised to young boys (occasionally girls) by the publishers of The Conshohocken Recorder and The Weekly Advertiser, two minuscule newspapers published in the Philadelphia suburbs, probably not that different from many other local papers at the time. The way the income was earned by those who delivered it, however, was unusual.
It’s hard to imagine a time when anyone would want to read these weekly ten-page tabloids. As its name suggests, The Advertiser was crammed with ads for local businesses, next to brief articles about local doings. The Recorder, I guess, recorded local news, but like its competitor, supported itself by advertising the same pizzerias, barbershops, and insurance agencies that placed identical ads in our local church bulletin.
Decades before the internet, there were far fewer places to get news, and decades before cable and streaming, there was far less to watch on TV. In the Philadelphia area we had the Holy Trinity of Channels 3, 6, and 10 (NBC, ABC, and CBS) plus whatever you could find on UHF: Channels 17, 29, and 48, whose fare ran heavily to Gilligan’s Island and The Flying Nun reruns, 1960s Japanese anime cartoons like Astro Boy and Marine Boy, and black-and-white movies from the 1950s and earlier. In that entertainment wasteland, why not peruse the papers to see what The Advertiser was advertising and The Recorder was recording?
Delivering papers at a young age would be good for me, said my dad. When you were a kid, things that sounded frankly awful were always good for you.
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