Well now, it's been a while since I posted, and I need to do a little catch up, I guess. Now that we're heading into better weather, I'll be back out on the road a bit more, and the posts will pick up. In the meantime, here's one that answers a question that my sister Ginny posed to me a week or so ago; "When did you start hating snow so much? When you were a kid, you loved it".
Okay, fair enough. Like most kids, yeah, I did love snow - mostly though, because if we got enough of it, there would be no school; and after about sixth grade, I hated school about as much as I now hate winter and snow!
But I started thinking about it a little, and tried to remember when I first realized that snow is just a miserable substance, and I think I've got a good idea of when the light went on.
From the time I was 10 or 11, I wanted a newspaper route. I really liked the idea of having some money coming in each week, and I thought delivering papers would be an okay way of getting it. Of course, it didn't hurt that I'd become friendly with the kids who delivered the papers in our neighborhood, both the Long Island Press, and Newsday, and they had told me that it was a pretty good gig.They must have made an impression, because all these years later, I can remember their names; Don Mattson delivered the Press, and Joe Billmeyer was the Newsday carrier. Joe lived a couple of blocks away, on Homestead avenue, and he used to play baseball with us from time to time, so I was a little more friendly with him. When I got old enough to have a route (I think you had to be 12), I asked both Joe and Don how to get one. Joe told me that he was going to give up his route, since he was now in High School, and he did a lot of after school activities, which would interfere with delivering Newsday. So, he put a word in for me with his Manager, a nice guy named, believe it or not, Mr. Whiffie. I filled in the application, and one day, Mr. Whiffie took Mom and I to the School Administration Building to get my 'working papers' (Mom didn't drive).  Couple of days later, and I got the word, I had my paper route!
Now, back in those days, Newsday did not publish on Sunday, it was Monday - Saturday only, and it cost .5c per day. So a week's worth of papers cost the subscriber .30c, quite a bargain by today's costs! As the delivery boy, we were paid .1c for each daily paper we delivered, so for each subscriber, we earned .6c per week. When I took the route over, it had 52 subscribers, so I was making about $3 per week, plus tips. Back then, tips were anywhere from .5c to .25c per week. Tips varied, based on how well you delivered the papers, in terms of time you got them to the people, to where you left them, etc., but on a typical week, I was making about $9 - $10.
I started delivering papers in the fall, probably in late September, and for most of the fall, it wasn't too bad. I had a basket on the front of my bicycle, attached to the handlebars, and two baskets on either side of the back wheel. I could pretty comfortably carry up to about 70 thick papers (which were usually Thursday, which was when all the sales ads were printed). And you could make pretty good time getting the route done, especially if you 'flipped' (threw) the papers. Newsday's policy was that they preferred the carriers to put the papers in the mailbox, or on the doorstep (dooring, we called it), but if you could get your customers to agree, you could flip the papers. We all wanted to flip them, because it cut the time it took to do the route substantially.
All went well into the late fall, I was making (and spending) decent money, and I had increased the number of subscribers since I took the route over. All was good.
And then, it happened. Snow. Lots of snow. Several storms in quick succession left the roads and sidewalks coated with a thick bed of white. And the newspapers had to be delivered, they never took a day off, so you couldn't take a day off. And that's when I began to really hate snow.
You ever try to peddle a 26 inch Ross Bicycle, loaded with maybe 60 newspapers, through six inches of snow? Or maneuver it through a couple of inches of slush and ice? How about having to climb over and through huge piles of snow just to reach the stoops of your customers? On the bike.....off the bike....on the bike....off the bike....YUCK! And back then, the 'stylish' outerwear for us hip kids was a heavy wool Navy "pea" coat. As warm as those coats were, they had a couple of issues when it snowed. First, the wool was so rough, as opposed as to those nice smooth nylon jackets, it caught and held every flake that hit it. After about 10 minutes, you looked like you'd been dipped in an egg wash, then in a dish of flour; you'd be white from top to bottom! Then, as the snow sat on your coat, it would begin to melt, and wick it's way to the inside of your coat, thus causing your sweater, shirt, or whatever you had on under the coat to get soaking wet. So you'd end up after about 20 minutes or so soaking wet, pushing a heavy bicycle through the snow, your feet freezing up, your fingers coming close to frostbite, trudging over un-shoveled walks to put papers by the doors. The attraction of having a paper route faded quickly in lousy weather.
One time, we had so much snow, I tied a big plastic wash basket to a sled, and pulled the damn thing around the neighborhood, instead of struggling with the bicycle. Not a lot better, especially since the silly thing fell over several times, causing the papers to fall out into the snow.
And, of course, your local newspaper kid was a convenient and easy target for snowball throwers. Young kids, older kids, they'd all toss 'em at you, knowing you really couldn't stop and fire back, 'cause you had to finish your route. Nothing better than going up a walkway, dropping the paper on the stoop, then about halfway back to the sidewalk, getting pelted with half a dozen hard formed snowballs!
Try to collect your money, and make change, with frozen fingers; remember, we dealt mostly with nickels, dimes, and the occasional quarter. Easily dropped, easily lost in the snow. Hell, even if you could make the change and get the account up to date, when you tried to enter it in your cash book, your pen would be frozen and wouldn't write!
Yeah, I'm convinced now, it was all those years of delivering papers that really turned me against the cold and snow. When we were kids, taking our sleds to the Country Club and riding up and down the slopes for hours on end was fun, and I did that as much as I could. And yeah, running through Norris Playground, throwing snowballs back and forth with my buddies, standing on the hill by the LIRR grade crossing at NHP Road and hitting trains, buses, and trucks with snowballs, that was all fun. But once I had to 'work' in the bad weather, when being out in it wasn't so much voluntary, that's when the fun stopped.
And so, Ginny, and all of you who wonder how I came to hate the white crap so much, there you go. I'm pretty sure that dragging those papers around in it was the genesis of my hatred.
Now, as I sit watching yet another 8+ inches fall, I must ask, where the hell is the nice weather?