Thursday December 16, 2004 – The Paper Route

Thursday December 16, 2004 – The Paper Route

I called my Dad the other day and he was complaining about how cold it was in El Paso. It does get cold in the winter in El Paso, which is 3750 feet above sea level. My dad’s place sits at the base of the Franklin Mountains, their highest peak towers 7200 feet above sea level. The city sits at north latitude 31 degrees 47 minutes and 25 seconds and at west longitude 106 degrees 25 minutes and 24 seconds. In the winter, it gets down below freezing at night and I can remember one year in the early 1960s when it dropped to an all time low of –8 degrees Fahrenheit.

As a kid back in the early 60s, I had a paper route and I would get up at 5:30 in the morning in the winter. It would be freezing and I would get dressed in front of a heater we had in the living room willing the blowing heat to keep me from shivering as I pulled on jeans, t-shirt, sweat shirt, jacket and gloves. Out the door and onto my Vespa 125 motor scooter, that I had borrowed money from my dad to buy from Sears. It was 1961 and I had nearly paid off my $325 interest free loan at $20/month, over a half of my take home. Gas took another big chunk, and entertainment and clothes ate up the rest. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which ran from 1959 to 1953 starred Dwayne Hickman, who would appear each week in a new sport shirt that I had to own. Needless to say, I spent a good portion of my earnings trying to keep up with Dobie.

Once I had the Vespa started, the smell of gasoline and oil spewing from the exhaust of the 2-cycle single cylinder engine still a fond memory, I drove down to the all-night Texaco station where my supervisor would have dropped off a bundle of the El Paso Times cinched lengthwise with a single strand of wire. Most times I could pull a couple of papers out from the middle to loosen the stack sufficient to get the rest of the papers out. I bought a box of rubber bands with me and I would roll the papers and cinch them with a rubber band and stack them in two large canvas bags. The bags were linked together by a strip of canvas with a hole in the center large enough to accommodate my head. As I rolled the papers, I was wearing the bags with my head through the hole one bag resting on my back the other on my chest.

I got to know the attendants at the Texaco station where the papers were dropped. We were fellow night workers. Most of the attendants were GIs from Ft Bliss Army Base working nights to earn extra money. Most were bachelors, who would regale me of their adventures helping women in distress with car trouble—I suspect the women also had trouble with the men in their lives as well, including the service station attendants who would only complicate matters, though, to their credit, the attendants did fix the mechanical problems. The station itself was ten to fifteen years old and it had two pump station islands, each with two pumps—regular and premium. It had three service bays with hydraulic lifts. The attendants would also bring their own cars and service them when it was slow at night. The concrete area in the bays and on either side of the pump islands was darkened with grease and oil dropping. And the entire station smelled of gasoline, oil, and new tire rubber.

Back then, the service station attendant’s job was to pump your gas, check your oil, clean your windshield and check your tires. Besides getting filled up you were lucky to get your windshield clean without asking. In the winter, the attendants would invite me into the station office where the cash register and the heater were. Once in a great while, one of them would bring in doughnuts, which they would invite me to share along with a cup of coffee.

When the bags were filled, I would stand and mount the Vespa and begin my route. It ran from Dyer Street, Texas Highway 478 up Truman Avenue to Byron Street. I would turn right on Byron and then right again on Lincoln back to Dyer, left on Dyer and left again on Johnson Avenue—the avenues in the neighborhood were last names of presidents. I would go up Johnson until it dead ended at Travis Elementary School, left a block on Lackland Street to Lincoln, up a block, then right on North Stevens Street a block and left again on Johnson and then up Johnson to Byron, right in front of Our Lady of Assumption Church and down Byron to Hayes and right to complete my route.

I’d get back home at 6:45 or so and would grab breakfast before jumping back on my Vespa for my commute to Austin High School for my 7:30 class. I liked the early class as it got me out of school an hour early. It wasn’t a bad way to go through high school.