It was dawn, and the street was empty. That was half the appeal of it. No cars, no people, just me on a bike with a canvas bag over my shoulders and a stack of papers wrapped tight enough to throw. The Contra Costa Times dropped them in our driveway early, before anybody else in the neighborhood was up, and my sister and I would stuff the ads inside, wrap each one with a rubber band, and fold it down to a size that would fly.
Most customers were fine with the paper tossed onto their driveway. Some liked them porched. A well wrapped, well banded paper could be thrown from the street, off a moving bike, and land right up on the porch, and those were the customers who tipped. So I learned to throw, and if the toss was on target but a bit long it would thud on those wood front doors with a satisfying sound. Over the years I got pretty good at it. You learn fast from the misses, because a miss means you stop, lay the bike down, fish the paper out of somebody’s shrub by hand, and walk it up to the door. That costs time, and time was the whole game. The faster the route, the better. When you had customers on both sides of the street, papers were flying both directions and you had no hands on the handlebars.
One morning I had just landed a good run of throws, both sides, feeling it, and I looked up to see a pickup truck parked dead in my path. No hands on the bars, going at a good clip, almost no time to react. I got my hands back on just before I slammed straight into the front bumper. Me, my papers, and the bag all went up over the cab and into the bed of the truck. I wasn’t hurt. Shaken up good, but not hurt. The bike was another story. Broken frame, not rideable. So I walked over and borrowed my neighbor Curt’s bike and finished the route.
The funny part is my sister Kim ran into a station wagon on her bike a few years later. I still don’t know if that’s a family thing or just a rite of passage.
Here’s what I didn’t really see at the time. The route was a business, and I was running it. Once a month I’d sit down with the coordinator, hand over the money I had collected, and we’d go through it like any account review. New accounts. The rubber bands I had to buy for packaging. The rewards you could earn for hitting certain distribution targets. I was collecting receivables door to door, hoping for tips, before I knew a single one of those words. Growing up in the sixties and seventies provided a kid that kind of schooling without ever making a big deal out of it.
Years later, when I was bringing new traders into the lumber business, I started handing each of them the same book. It is called Rain: What a Paperboy Learned About Business, by Jeffrey Fox. It’s a parable about a kid on a paper route, and it lays the whole thing out: take care of your customers, own your territory like it belongs to you, go get new accounts, plan around the weather, handle the money. Fox makes the case that running a paper route can teach you about as much about business as a fancy degree will. I believe it, because I lived the front half of that book before I ever lived the back half. The kid on the bike and the guy doing the trades turned out to be the same person. The book was just the string that connected the two.
And there is one more thing I never thought about back then, throwing those papers onto those porches. The paper started as pulp. The pulp started as a tree. Even then, before I knew the first thing about any of it, I was already in the wood business.