Read All About It

And 40 of them weighed about 80 tons to a 10-year-old trying to ride his 10-speed up Pinewood Hill. My brother and I divided the route with the amount of papers somewhat relative to the number of hills you had to ascend. Though we did have one assignment called “the Shit Route,” which was usually a weeklong penalty quietly enforced and served whenever one of us was caught stealing from the pot of single-copy sales we were supposed to divide at the end of the month. The Shit Route had the most papers and all the hills.

Anyway, Labor Day was backbreaking, usually about six or seven sections, and the paperboy bag was a weight around my neck like an ox’s yoke. One year Dad got the idea to summon me and Fletch downtown, for a street festival, which my hometown didn’t commonly have on this holiday. He loaded up our bags with even more copies and told us to hawk them until they were gone.

So I’ve actually stood on a street corner, waved a paper in the air, recited a headline from the front and told folks to “read all about it.” It wasn’t an extra edition (I was no longer a paperboy when Dad published a true news extra in 1988, the day the mill was sold) so I didn’t scream that.

But it’s not a Looney Tunes cliche; that’s how papers were in fact sold, even as recently as 1985.

In that spirit, here’s some headlines. Read all about ’em.