Now based in Australia, traces his family’s close ties with The Herald, from the days when his father, Reuben, sold papers for a living to the establishment of one of the Bay’s proudest family business success stories
MY father, Reuben Volpe, arrived in Port Elizabeth in 1928, having come to South Africa from a small town in Lithuania.
He worked in a butchery for a few months before starting his own business in Korsten under the name R Volpe, later to become Volpes.
Though fluent in five European languages, his grasp of English was rudimentary and, to improve, he took out a subscription to The Herald – the beginning of a lifelong relationship.
Each morning, he would walk to the letterbox to retrieve “the paper” before settling into a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee. He read from beginning to end, stretching his arms out to fold back each page.
As a young boy I marvelled at this feat and tried to emulate him, but succeeded only in crumpling the paper.
In the early 1930s, he became a Herald distributor.
Each morning at 4.30am he would set off for Newspaper House on his Norton 600 motorbike with an assistant on the back. After collecting his allocation of papers he would return to Korsten.
It was a hair-raising journey, my father astride the petrol tank, the newspapers on the seat and the poor assistant on the pillion hanging on to the newspapers as well as his life.
My father eventually increased sales to 1 200 papers a day, but by then his newspapers were delivered to him.
The Herald was always more than just a source of news and entertainment for the Volpe family.
It was an important instrument in the growth of Volpes.
I have clear memories of hours spent in the advertising department at Newspaper House in the days before computerisation, poring over the mat service books in search of suitable images for our advertisements.
A researcher in the distant future wishing to track the history of Volpes would find a fossilised reflection of the business in the thousands of advertisements in The Herald archives, as well as scores of articles marking the business’s milestones. Last year, a final article covered the sale of the business to Coricraft.
Some newspapers are just newspapers but The Herald is more than that. It threads together the last 170 years of Port Elizabeth’s history.
On one level it tells the story of the city, on another, it’s been a reliable friend to generations of individual Port Elizabethans.
We can take pride in its accomplishments and in its endurance. A hundred and seventy-five years is already twice the human allotment and I expect it has a long way to go yet.