By the time I was ten years old, and in fifth grade, there were a number of new things I was allowed to do. Owing to their status as Great Depression survivors, my parents were extraordinarily hard-working and thrifty. And they were determined that I should be the same. So it was that I was allowed (in truth, urged) to go with my neighbor, Gary Smith, down to the office of the Cartersville Tribune and sign up for a paper route. Its office was in the back of an old building near Railroad and Main at that time, not the present, newer building pictured above.
The hardest part of the job was waiting at the back of the newspaper office every afternoon for the papers to be counted out to us. The other paperboys were...well...not nerdy, like me. Waiting around with them might have been intimidating, had not my neighbor Gary been with me. He was a few years older, and pretty streetwise in an innocent 1950's sort of way. I managed to keep a pretty low profile, avoiding the verbal (and sometimes physical) conflicts which took place.
Once set free from the waiting area with my cloth bag imprinted with the Tribune logo, I headed north past Lay's 5 and 10 and the First Presbyterian Church to Etowah Avenue where my route actually began. It was an uncomplicated job, compared to my later stint with the Atlanta Journal, after we moved to Marietta. I estimate I only had about thirty or forty papers to deliver, on four or five streets, with no collections to make. I assume subscribers mailed in their payments; I don't remember those details. Also unlike the paper route in Marietta, I don't remember ever getting any complaints from subscribers, no matter how late I was in getting their paper to them. So I never hurried.
I didn't hurry because I discovered that I enjoyed reading the newspaper! I would devour sports, comics and then local news, in that order. I remember seeing my first baseball box score on one of those afternoons; the power of this statistic captured and transported me. Reading exotic names like Cleveland Indians and Pittsburgh Pirates fed a thirst for travel, which later took me around the world (but never to Cleveland or Pittsburgh).
As an aside, I later discovered that most small towns in Georgia did not have daily newspapers at that time. Weeklies were much more common. For some reason, it did not seem strange to me that my little town of 7,500 could support such a paper. After all, it was only about six to eight pages a day (making my paper bag very light and easy to carry).
My route took me from the heart of downtown all the way to what was pretty much the edge of town in those days - the WBHF radio station near Old Mill Road. Then I had to turn around and walk all the way back to the downtown area, before heading home up North Erwin Street, in the opposite direction from my route. The wonderful thing is that my parents never worried about me wandering all over town by myself at age ten, nor should they have done so. The world was (mostly) a safe and friendly place in 1956.
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