How I Learned To Drive

When I was 13 years old and entering junior high (do they still call it that, I wonder), I felt the need to have a little money in my pocket. I needed a job. And I got one.

Today you can be an Internet wonder at 12 and a millionaire at 14. But back in the day, jobs for 13 year old kids: not so many. I got a job delivering the morning newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Technically, I was self-employed. I didn’t work for the newspaper company. I bought newspapers from the publisher and paid a wholesale price and sold them to my customers for a retail price. If a customer didn’t pay, I took the loss. The publisher always got paid.

Today’s newspapers are a shadow of what they were back in the day. If I threw one of my Sunday papers at you and it hit you, you’d be dead. The Thursday paper was no slouch, either. If I hit you with a Thursday paper it would knock you down. You’d be stunned for a few minutes, but you’d live. Probably.

I got up at 4 AM every morning for two years to deliver the morning paper. Cold, rainy mornings were bad; rainwater that felt like ice water ran down my raincoat and over my numbed hands. Winters were brutal. Every morning my hands got so cold they hurt badly and I couldn’t make my fingers work. Several times during a delivery I would have to stop and light a paper on fire and hold my hands close to warm them enough that I could use my fingers. I wore two pairs of gloves but it didn’t help much. One snowy morning the front tire on my bicycle went flat at the beginning of my route and I had to roll the bike from house to house through several inches of snow. The weight of the newspapers on the front wheel forced the tire flat causing the inner-tube to come out of the tire and jam in the forks, which prevented the wheel from turning. I cleared the jam but as soon as the wheel began rolling it jammed again. I lifted the front wheel (and the basket of newspapers) off the ground and half-carried the bike through the snow for the rest of my route, which was five miles long. By the time I got home it was 8:30 (I had to be in school at 9). My hands hurt so badly I couldn’t even ring the doorbell, so I kicked the storm door a few times to alert my mother to let me in. I went to the bathroom lavatory and put my hands under cool running water. As my hands warmed up and came back to life, the pain I experienced was unforgettably agonizing.

I could fill a book with stories from my paper route. Dog bites were a constant threat. There were no leash laws then; dogs ran loose and loved to attack kids on bicycles. I was bitten a half dozen times by fairly large dogs, like German shepherds and collies. If my mother found out I had been bitten I would have to go to the doctor and get a tetanus shot. (No one, including doctors, ever mentioned the possibility of rabies. It was a different era.) One afternoon as I rode my route collecting payments, a collie ran up from behind me (sneak attack, as usual) to bite me for the second time. (You might think after the first attack the dog’s owner would keep his dog in his yard, but people didn’t care.) That was it! I’d had enough. I threw down my bike and chased that dog all the way to its owner’s yard, fully intending to kill it if I could get my hands on it. When the dog’s owner came out of his house, I shouted at him that if I saw his dog again I would kill it. And I meant it. The dog-owner said nothing. I don’t know if he was alarmed, bewildered, or amused at my frothing-at-the-mouth fury but whichever, he decided to leave it alone.

A dog incident with a more satisfying outcome occurred one morning as I cycled past a house where a large black dog lived. The dog normally stayed in the back yard, but every day as I rode past the house and threw a rolled-up newspaper into the yard, the dog would come tearing around the side of the house and make an aggressive run at me. On this particular morning, I threw the paper toward the house as usual, intending to land it near the front steps about eighty feet away. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the paper arcing through the air end-over-end, I can still see the dog tearing around the side of the house to threaten me, and I can recall watching with amazement as their paths intersected perfectly. The rolled-up paper scored a direct hit on the dog’s nose. The dog was plenty impressed by my aim. He didn’t bother me again.

As I said, there are many stories I could tell you about my paper route. But my learning to drive started with the Sunday paper. That paper was so big I could fit only twenty into the basket on my bike. My route was 5 miles long and there was no way I could deliver over a hundred newspapers in a reasonable amount of time if I had to bicycle back to the drop spot after every 20 papers. So early every Sunday morning my dad got up with me and we would take his big Buick Electra to the drop spot and load the Sunday papers into the trunk. We drove to the first house on my route, at which point I would jump out of the car and start my deliveries. I would grab a paper and carry it to a house, run back to the car, grab a paper and carry it to the other side of the street. I ran back and forth across the street for the length of my five mile route, while my dad drove his Buick Electra with its 455 cubic inch, 325 horsepower V-8 engine down the street at 2 miles per hour. How many miles I ran every Sunday morning I don’t know. I didn’t mind the running. I was glad my dad was driving that Buick loaded with newspapers. Even so, it took several hours to complete the delivery. When we finished, dad would ask me if I wanted to drive the car back home. Early on a Sunday morning there was little to no traffic. I was always excited to drive the big Buick. It was a Sunday morning ritual: dad and I delivered the thick, heavy newspapers and then I drove the Buick home. One day he began letting me drive it in other places. I remember the first time I pulled the Buick onto a highway. I was motoring down the road quite comfortably, and dad remarked, “The minimum speed is 45.” Driving 45 felt like a bit of a stretch for me, but I wasn’t about to give up the driver’s seat. I drove faster.

My next job, when I was 15, was drugstore delivery driver (yes, there was a time when drugstores delivered your meds right to your front door). During a Friday afternoon interview, the pharmacist asked me if I had a drivers license. I hadn’t actually needed a drivers license until then, so I answered truthfully, “No, but I’ll have one by Monday.”

It wasn’t a problem. After all, I had been driving for years.