The black and white of newspapers has long been in my blood. My first jobs as a kid were delivering papers growing up in Seattle. 

First was the Outlook, a free weekly I carried to about 150 homes and apartments near our Green Lake home. I think, even in those cash-cow days of newspaper, it didn’t last very long, perhaps several years. 

But it provided a good gig for a boy. I ran the streets and tossed papers at doors. I was a pretty good aim. My largest check for one month’s work was $18.35, which helped buy baseball cards.

The Outlook also offered what were called Bonus Bucks. Carriers received two Bonus Bucks each month. If you saved up enough, you could order something from their catalogue. My best prizes were a renaissance chess set, of which I still have a few pieces, and a Kodak Instamatic 126 camera, my first. 

I got in trouble only once, when a friend helping deliver my route convinced me to stick many of the papers in a dumpster, skip some blocks and finish sooner. Who would know, he said.  

The district manager did.  

Before I was even home, he found me and asked about papers in the trash. My friend, thinking quickly, said they were extras that we didn’t need. The manager didn’t seem to buy it, but he couldn’t prove otherwise so rather than fire me, he let me off with a warning. I never did that again. 

From there, I graduated to a Seattle Times route I inherited from my older brother. This was big league. I had about 40-50 customers from 73rd to 74th, Greenwood to Fremont, with my home smack in the middle.  

These were the days when carriers, just about all kids, picked up papers from a central shack in the afternoon somewhere in the neighborhood. Fights broke out over who got their papers first, which was usually done by time of arrival, but at times someone would try to cut in line and fists would settle it. 

Once I had mine, I would hustle, winging papers from sidewalks to porches set high on hills. I broke only one window over a few years. 

The Sunday paper was delivered in the morning, so I had to rise about 5 a.m. and get them distributed by 7. I was often out there in total darkness, wandering along with a metal cart of fat newspapers, packed full of advertisements.  

If it rained, I would wake up my parents. “Ummm, it’s raining. Can someone drive me?”  

Amazingly, one of them, usually dad, did.  

When I got home, I pulled out the sports section, got a bowl of cereal and settled in the kitchen while my father tried to go back to sleep. 

I had to collect the money from subscribers, so each month, at night, I would knock on doors, announce, “Collecting for the Seattle Times,” and hold up my receipt book. Most paid on the spot. Others, I had to return several times. Some stiffed me. A few gave me a tip, sometimes even a dollar, which bought a lot of baseball cards back then.

I earned about a buck per subscriber, so my take-home pay was about $40 to $50, which I used to pay my tuition at Blanchet High School, a private, Catholic school all seven kids in our family attended.  

When I was a sophomore, I quit the route and landed a job as a janitor after school and a dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant. I would go on to work all through my days at the University of Washington. Delivering the Seattle Times remains a favorite.

Today, of course, delivering papers is a different deal. It's early mornings, routes have hundreds of customers and carriers are adults driving cars. 

When I think about it, today it would be unheard of for a kid to wander the streets at night, knock on doors and ask to be paid for delivering the paper. Then, it was routine. 

And I still have one of those Seattle Times receipt books, filled with carbon copy receipts. The price for one month delivery was $3.50. A bargain.

One of our former carriers, by the way, will be featured in a story by Devin Weeks in our Sunday edition. It's sure to be brilliant.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

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Bill Buley is assistant managing editor of The Press. He can be reached at [email protected].