Driving Duty Has Fringe Benefits
She masters manual shift, but, oh, that clutch isn’t happy.
AS IS THE CASE with many paper routes, ours started when my brother Randy signed up for a bike route in the late 1960s in our village of Coloma, Wisconsin, to earn some extra cash. However, in our mostly rural area, Randy’s job quickly escalated to a car route that involved the whole family, especially when winter rolled around.
Mom was most often tagged as chauffeur, with one of us kids riding shotgun, shooting a folded paper into the box next to the recipient’s mailbox. But as each older kid signed up for driver’s ed, we were drafted for delivery duty. In many ways, it was valuable for practicing driving skills.
Starting out, I was still getting the hang of shifting gears on our old Pontiac Catalina station wagon. It was a big clunky car and I learned quickly just how close I could get to a newspaper box without hitting it. My brother Scott wasn’t quite as adept; he once ran over a customer’s fence while turning around in the unlucky lady’s driveway.
My biggest difficulty was with the clutch, which I kept slipping. With all of those stops and starts, and the short distances between delivery points, that clutch got a major workout. We blew three of them before Dad finally acquired a second car for us to use to run errands and deliver newspapers.
It was a 1957 Chevy that
Dad picked up through the school district where he worked. He fixed it up and painted it bright orange. We called it The Bomb, and had a great time showing it off to our friends. The only problem was the heater didn’t work very well—I came home with frostbitten fingers and toes more than once after a winter paper route run in The Bomb.
Fortunately, we all found better jobs by the end of high school and handed over the route to some other lucky person (or family).
I’m not sure what became of the Pontiac, but Dad traded in the orange Chevy for another
’57 Chevy, which he painted bright red. We called that one The Cherry Bomb.