I was introduced to small business in 1965, moving from working as a salaried employee to running an independent small business. My salaried job was sweeping a feed warehouse. I began that job at 50 cents per week and worked my way up to $1 per week, but my income wasn’t keeping pace with my appetite for bowling and snacks. I applied and was accepted as a delivery carrier for the Billings Gazette newspaper. I was assigned a route with 55 customers. The newspapers arrived on the train every morning. The train did not stop. The bundles of papers were pushed out of the door of a train car as it passed through town. I found the bundles with my name on them, cut the wire that bound them, folded individual newspapers and delivered them to the houses on my route. At the end of each month, I visited my customers and collected their subscription price, which was $1.50 per month. From that amount, I paid the newspaper company for the papers I had received.

I quickly learned that there were a lot of tricks to the trade. One important trick was to order the correct number of papers. It was essential to have a few extra copies because inevitably a few were ruined by the wires that held the bundles and the process of being pushed from a moving train. Extra copies didn’t make any money, however. Another trick was ensuring collections were completed on time to avoid cash flow problems. Collections were the nemesis of my business. I delivered papers between 5:30 and 6:30 each morning. I didn’t mind getting up, and I could cover my section of the town with my bicycle pretty quickly. Collections, however, had to be accomplished after school or on Saturdays. If someone weren’t at home, I’d have to go back. Sometimes, they wouldn’t have the cash when I arrived. I learned to carry some extra cash to give change for larger bills. Most people were pretty good about paying, and a few tipped, which helped.

Another issue for me was building my business. New paper delivery routes were set up with 50 to 60 customers. Still, if you got new customers, you could develop your route up to as many as 150 customers before the newspaper forced you to divide the route and give some customers to another delivery person. There were two ways to gain new customers. The hard way was to convince someone who didn’t subscribe to do so. I worked on houses along my route that didn’t subscribe rather than expanding my territory. I paid attention when a new family moved in. I’d give them a few free copies to get them interested and then show up and invite them to subscribe. The second way to get new customers was to trade territory with another deliverer. I would always take new customers when another deliverer had a customer that was out of their area or wanted to shed a bit of work. Sometimes, I could gain by trading a block with five customers for one with seven if the other deliverer found a particular block convenient.

I was successful in the business. The sweet spot for a paper route in those days was 110 customers, which produced just under $600 a year in profits. Anything over $600 meant I would have to file income tax, so the goal was to come in just under that amount. I had no trouble managing 150 customers because I “hired” my brother to do collections and kept my income below the threshold. The brother who did the collections for me was lousy at delivering. He wouldn’t get up when the alarm went off. His mind wandered, and it took him much longer to cover my route than I did myself. The next younger brother was better at deliveries but was no good at collections. When he grew up, he became a first-rate salesman, but when he was young, he was too shy. On the other hand, he did seem to get more tips than the rest of us.

When I moved from delivering newspapers to mowing lawns and shoveling snow, the paper company divided my route into two routes. I had two brothers who bid on those routes and got them, but neither could grow their routes very much. The brother who was good at collections was first to give up his route. He tired of the seven-day-a-week grind even though I helped him deliver Sunday papers, which were larger and heavier most of the time, and I was his primary substitute when he took a day off. The other brother stayed longer in the business before giving up deliveries. He became a route supervisor for another daily paper when he became an adult. He picked up bundles of papers at the press plant in the middle of the night and delivered them to nearby towns for delivery. He could do that job for extra income and still do his day job. He was doing that job when a sudden heart attack ended his life.

These days, daily newspapers are almost a thing of the past. The Skagit Valley Herald only prints papers five days a week in our area. Cascadia Daily News, despite its name, only prints once per week. The Daily Herald also isn’t daily with five printings per week. Local journalism is moving to online formats. The Salish Current is an online-only news source. The big paper in our region is the Seattle Times, which still offers daily delivery for $14 per week. Customers are few and far between, and carriers all use cars for delivery.

We received a daily paper for many years. However, we found that we were getting most of our news from online sources and reading the paper less and less. When the newspaper raised the rates for obituaries and funeral home websites had more extended and more complete obituaries than the newspaper, I finally dropped our subscription.

However, I still look forward to the weekly small-town paper we receive. Something about having a newspaper in my hands still brings me joy.