Paper Routes

It was a dynasty; a paper-route dynasty. If you lived in the town of Brooklyn, Indiana, and you subscribed to a newspaper, chances are a Witmer-kid brought it to your door. Paper routes and Witmer kids were like bacon and eggs, like fire and smoke, like VW-micro buses and car trouble, they always came together.

Douglas was probably the first to get a paper route in Brooklyn, but Ron was the one who solidified the family’s position as the paper route kings of Brooklyn. Ron was almost single-handedly responsible for the famous spike in circulation of the Indianapolis Star in the mid-sixties. If you look up newspaper-subscription salesman in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Ron alongside the definition. Joe and Dennis carried the afternoon papers, the Indianapolis News and the Martinsville Reporter and they sold a few newspaper subscriptions of their own. Me? I occupied myself with the Pennsylvania Grit.

I was limited to The Grit because I was not old enough for a real paper route. You were supposed to be twelve years old, but the Witmer boys were able to sneak in at ten because, well, because we were the famous paper-route Witmers! I’m not sure which of my older brothers, spurred on by a picture of a beefy boy, holding a stack of cash, was the first to clip the coupon from the back of a comic book and request more information on “how to make real money selling The Pennsylvania Grit,” but it wasn’t long before a bundle of the newspapers began showing up the middle of every week. As the older boys moved on to the big money, carrying the daily papers, I took over the Grit route. The face price, of the paper, was fifteen cents, my cost was ten cents, which gave me a nickel profit margin on each one I could sell. If I didn’t sell all of them, I had to pay for the leftovers out of my own pocket. It was risky business, but most the time I did okay. I made enough to keep me in Polar Bars, RC cola and Pixie Stixs. What else do you need when your eight going on nine?

The Dynasty did not go unchallenged. The evil Kirk boys (Rusty and Randy) began to horn in, passing daily papers on the north side and selling The Grit willy-nilly all over town. I remember the utter shock of knocking on the door of one of my regular Grit customers only to find that one of the Kirk boys had already been there. To make matters worse, their mom was helping them! She was driving them around town in the family station wagon! I pictured them at the Post Office, waiting for the mail to come in, grabbing their bundle of Grits, and racing ahead of me to all my formerly loyal customers. Something had to be done. I found myself knocking on the Kirk’s front door. I asked if I might come in to chat.

I had never seen anything like the inside of the Kirk house. It was nearly impossible to move from one room to another. The clutter was so thick, the family had gone to clearing walking paths through it, just wide enough to to put one foot in front of another. The paths were worn into the carpet, a testament to the long-standing presence of the piles of junk. In a flash, it came to me. I now had the advantage. I suggested that the Kirk’s confine their Grit sales to the area south of Mill Street. I suggested that if they ventured into my side of Brooklyn again, I might be forced to mention, to Mrs. Collins, the town gossip, that the inside of their house looked like a landfill. We quickly came to terms. I know it seems hard to believe that a boy of nine years old could be so clever, but as I remember it, I was an amazing child.

This was not the first, or the last time the Witmer family had to defend its newspaper dynasty and I cannot, in one entry, begin to tell you of all the adventures related to our paper routes. I will need another entry or two to tell you of the trips Ron and Joe won for selling subscriptions, the challenges of collecting from our customers and the interesting people we met as a result.

P.S.: This weeks quiz question: Do you remember “Neighbor.”