According to an Associated Press story on May 17, the New York State legislature just passed a law making it illegal for anyone under 14 to take part in “the time-honored tradition of a newspaper route.” 

This article resonated with me. I had no idea teenagers were still delivering newspapers. I could not find anywhere on the internet, though, the name of even one big city where this practice survives.

But the main reason this article struck a chord is that I was a “newspaper boy” for four years in the 1950s. From ages 10 to 14, I rode my bicycle 365 days a year, delivering the Philadelphia Bulletin to about 75 homes in a section of West Oak Lane near Broad Street and Olney Avenue. The Bulletin, which went out of business in February 1982, had a ubiquitous advertising slogan: “Nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.” I don't think it was hyperbole.

Most of the households on my route did subscribe to the Bulletin, which claimed in the 1950s that it had the largest daily circulation of any newspaper in the country, about 900,000, even more than the New York Times, and at one point, evening newspapers outnumbered morning dailies. These numbers gradually switched until today, when, according to Wikipedia, “There are no big city newspapers in the U.S. that still publish on a true 'evening' cycle, i.e., printing and distribution in the late afternoon.”

Real-life ‘Newsies’

The reasons for this sea change are no secret. When I started delivering the Bulletin on my bicycle, there was only one TV newscast in Philadelphia at 11 p.m. It was on Channel 10, hosted by legendary anchorman John Facenda. It went from 11-11:15 p.m. That's right; 15 minutes out of an entire day! 

Today, of course, there are 24-hour cable news stations and a constant drumbeat throughout the news cycle. Many young people have never read an actual newspaper from front to back, preferring to get their “news” on a personal screen, mainly from social media, which does not have to adhere to any standards of fairness, objectivity, or even truth.

In the fifth grade I wanted to have a newspaper route because I had no money otherwise, and how many other afternoon job opportunities were there for a 10-year-old? A school friend told me there was a garage a few blocks from my house where I could sign up and where the papers were picked up every day by neighborhood boys.

My contemporaries may remember that daily newspapers back then were huge compared to today's thin leaflets. Once a week there was a food section, usually 16 pages, filled with full-page ads for supermarket chains. 

The Sunday Bulletin was so big and had so many sections my bicycle probably needed orthopedic surgery. I had to return to the garage again and again to get more, and of course the papers had to be delivered, no matter how cold or hot, rainy or snowy. And this pretty much ruled out summer vacations.

Reading was fundamental

I never felt sorry for myself, though. In fact, I enjoyed almost everything about the job. The responsibility made me feel like an adult. Most people treated us with respect, and we got to make friends with several neighbors whom we otherwise never would have known. Some girls in the neighborhood even thought we were pretty cool. As a bonus, I read the newspaper every day. 

I absolutely loved sports columnist Sandy Grady, who later became a political columnist for the Daily News. His liberal use of metaphors, similes, humor and colorful figures of speech were as impressive to me as the writing of any literary giant. And it developed in me a love for great writing, for which I am forever grateful to Grady. 

If there was one negative to the job, it was the people who would not answer the door when it came time for me to collect money or who told me to come back some other time. As I mentioned, the main reason I became a paperboy was to make some spending money. 

The daily Bulletin was 5 cents, and the Sunday Bulletin was 15 cents. Paperboys got one-third of that. (There were no “papergirls” that I knew of.) At the end of the week I took home about $7. That sounds abysmal, but I was thrilled to be paid actual money, which I usually spent in the local candy store on pinball machines (5 cents a game), which I loved, or on a hoagie (35 cents) and milkshake (25 cents), a Captain Marvel comic book (10 cents), “pimple ball” for stickball games (15 cents) or admission to the Bromley Movie Theater on Broad Street (15 cents) after my newspapers were delivered. 

That 15 cents bought me an entire Saturday afternoon with two cowboy movies (usually Roy Rogers and Gene Autry), a newsreel, a 20-minute Flash Gordon or Superman serial, and two or three Looney Tunes cartoons, which were as funny as anything I have seen since.

I hate to be an old nostalgia fogey, but I bet delivering newspapers in the 1950s was more fun — and much better exercise — than the almost nonstop scrolling and swiping on handheld phones that consume so much time for young people today.

Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.