Christmas Tips

Recently we got a note with holiday greetings from our newspaper carrier -- a woman who I wouldn't recognize if she hit me with a snowball. It made me wonder again what our culture is missing, not having kids deliver the morning paper. Then the other day I was trying to get my older sister Michelle to come up with some memories about the old G.C. Murphy store in our former hometown of Bellevue. But the time and the distances traveled since her youth conspired to reveal few memories.

"Remember paying your paper bill?" Michelle asked.

I did. Then, in a rush, I remembered that we'd had a route manager who had been ripping off us paperboys for years by shortchanging us. She didn't remember. On Saturday mornings we Pittsburgh Post-Gazette paperboys in Bellevue used a ground-level side door to head down the creaky basement stairs to the musty room in the house where the manager, Mr. Burkhart, held court. He was a cigar-chomping, gruff-voiced old cuss who sat hunched at a small wooden table where he received our bill payments. I recall the table was draped with a thread-worn red blanket, and that he lorded it over us with a selfishness that would have rivaled the moneylender from Crime and Punishment.

Mr. Burkhart would count out our change and count out our bills, and like some lender of old, he would imperceptibly tip things in his favor. We were too young to recognize it, or, in some cases, to young to even feel like we could say anything about it, though we had our suspicions that we were being burned.

"He was creepy," said my sister Michelle, who once seemed to me to be a fearless papergirl.

Not only was he creepy, he was a creep. He had been stealing from us paperboys and papergirls for years, until a paperboy who was a few years older than me blew the whistle to the higher-ups. I believe there was a story on it in the Post-Gazette at the time, and I think there was also an article in the Pittsburgh Press.

The chilly temperatures and the first dustings of snow have a nostalgic effect on me, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would think back to when we were paperboys. Back then, Christmas was a magical time, when we were we expecting presents from our parents. But it also was the time when the fruits of our news-delivering labors would be received. I am talking about Christmas tips.

When you're a lazy kid who’d rather sleep, getting up at dawn to deliver the morning paper is a task in and of itself. But we also had collecting to do. We would visit all of our customers in the evening and collect money for their newspaper bills, then pay the route manager what we owed, on a monthly basis. Collecting-time is when we kids would get to peek into the lives of say, the occupants of 24 East Grant Avenue (where the scary old lady lived and the blinds were always closed) or into the stale and smoky bachelor confines of #12 Melview Gardens. We got face-time with our customers when we knocked on the door and announced: "Collecting."

We also learned our first lessons in customer service. If we were good paperboys, or at least half-decent paperboys and rather charming, we also got Christmas tips. We're not talking chump change, we're talking fives and tens and sometimes even twenty-dollar-bills. This was twenty-five years ago, and those tips could add up to a few hundred dollars, just in time for Christmas. It was like manna from heaven for newsboys.

I asked my brother Christopher, who lives in Baltimore and is a couple years younger than me, if he remembered Mr. Burkhart. "I went down there with you guys to pay your bills when I was learning the routes with you, that's all," he said.

Every child in my family of twelve kids had a paper route, and we passed them down to each other as we grew out of them. The good reputation of an older sibling who’d delivered the paper before you could help you in that transition period when you hadn't yet mastered the route.

"Do you remember selling extras on Thanksgiving in front of Young's Drug Store?" Christopher reminded me. "We'd sell extras on the corner because there was no afternoon paper, no Pittsburgh Press that day."

I recalled those windy days, when we'd stand on the corner under the Young's marquee with our stacks of Post-Gazettes. The paper was thicker than normal because of the holiday, and we'd hawk copies to passing drivers who'd stop to buy them from us. The paper was a quarter at the time, and people often would tip us a quarter, or sometimes just give us a dollar. Sell a couple hundred papers and it added up.

"Man, we would make some cash," Christopher said.

It was usually cold and windy on those Thanksgivings, but we didn't mind the cold, as long as the papers were selling. Some customers would make the walk up Lincoln Avenue to buy copies of the paper from us. By the time we were selling the copies at the end of the stack, our hands would be black with newsprint. We didn't care, because when we were done hawking papers, we'd head back to the warmth of our family's old Victorian house on South Bryant Avenue.

"We'd come home and Mom would be pulling sticky buns out of the oven," Christopher said. I remembered them as caramel nut rolls, but the memory was so sweet, I said nothing.