I woke up about 4 a.m. the other day.
One of the fun things about being old.
As I pulled the covers up and snuggled back down in my nice warm bed, I heard the rain outside.
And I was glad I’m retired and didn’t have to go out in it.
But I thought about the person who had to deliver my paper.
Newspaper carriers have to work in the early morning darkness in all kinds of weather.
My first job was delivering the Cairo (Illinois) Evening Citizen.
It was the closest newspaper to Wickliffe.
But most people took the Paducah Sun-Democrat.
And as the name implies, the Cairo paper was published in the afternoon.
No early mornings for me.
But I hadn’t realized just how hilly Wickliffe is when I took the job.
The town is nothing but hills.
There’s Fort Jefferson Hill, Cemetery Hill, Tobacco Factory Hill and several hills that somebody forgot to name.
And each of them had a grade steeper than the law should allow.
And the Citizen, which folded a few years back, didn’t have a lot of circulation in Wickliffe.
Mostly just people who lived on top of hills.
Not a single person in The Flats was on my route.
I had never seen a bicycle with gears.
I had one of those one-speed bikes and it definitely wasn’t made for climbing hills.
So I’d find myself getting off to push about two-thirds of the way up.
But this one house on Cemetery Hill, about 100 feet from the top, had an ol’ yellow dog that would wait patiently each day to give me that extra bit of adrenaline to keep me pedaling to the top of the hill.
I think he only managed to snag my pants leg with his teeth twice.
That, of course, was the home of the woman who complained daily that her paper was never on the porch like she wanted it.
She was lucky it was in the yard.
And then came collection day.
You never heard so many hard luck stories in your life.
And after awhile, they’d yell at their kids, ‘Tell him I ain’t home.”
After a month of that, I was in the hole and decided to cut my losses and retire.
I wasn’t cut out to be a newspaper carrier.
Way too much work and too little pay.
Writing for newspapers, I found, is a whole lot easier than delivering them.
Today is International Newspaper Carrier Day.
Since people pay in advance for papers these days and the carriers don’t collect, you never see them.
But send a few kind thoughts their way.
It’s not an easy job.
And where would we be without them?