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Who had a real paper route when they were a kid?

(24 posts)
  • Started 1 year ago by Lawrence
  • Latest reply from spacecowboy57
  1. pstlpkr

    Lawrence

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    Just watched a coffee commercial, and it reminded me of times my Dad drove me around on my paper route on rainy days when I was in the 5th and 6th grades.

    I delivered the Wilmington Star (Monday - Saturday) and Washington Post (Sunday's).
    Both were morning papers, and had to be in the "box" by 6:00 A.M., and yes I rode my bike and had about 300 customers.
    I lived in Jacksonville N.C. back in "them" days.

    Who else had a paper route when they were kids?

    Posted 1 year ago #
  2. spacecowboy57

    spacecowboy57

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    round me, they've always had a fat guy in a station wagon do it. most jobs won't hire anyone under 15 these days. When i have kids i'm definitely going to make them get a job early to build character. My first job was a fry cook at the town pool when i was 15.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  3. pstlpkr

    Lawrence

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    When i have kids i'm definitely going to make them get a job early to build character.

    I agree Space.
    I think most guys in here had some kind of "real job" when they were kids.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  4. igloo

    igloo

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    I picked cans on the side of the road to buy the things I wanted , bb guns and the like .Dont laugh is was quite lucrative . My first real job was at 15 working in a movie theater on the weekends .

    “There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.”
    Posted 1 year ago #
  5. ernest

    ernest

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    I also had a real paper route as a kid,37 years ago.That was when they would only give that job to a kid. I saved up my money and bought a red fiberglass canoe that I still have today.I think it took a year to get.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  6. spacecowboy57

    spacecowboy57

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    most kids these days would have used that money to fuel their video game addiction.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  7. pstlpkr

    Lawrence

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    I bought plastic model car kits with mine, of course no one knew what a video game was back then.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  8. wallbright

    wallbright

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    I hustled baseball cards on my front lawn. Looking back on it was very very stupid as most of those are worth $20 or more now and I sold them for a quarter each lol. I made alot of money but I bet those business men who stopped by made a crap load. I didn't have my first real job until I was 17 and it was at a restaurant. I wasted the money on a sound system for my car and 200+ dvd's lol. Moral of the story, don't give a 17 year old a $400 weekly paycheck. This was only for full time during the summer and part time during part of the school year though.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  9. unclearthur

    unclearthur

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    First I worked in Christmas tree plantations , then for Dad at his Texaco station.

    If at first you don't succeed you are running about average.
    Posted 1 year ago #
  10. juni

    juni

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    My first job was delivering mail one summer as a kid. I'd have old people waiting impatiently by their mailboxes and being all grumpy if I was a couple of minutes late.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  11. chuckw

    chuckw

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    110 customers on my paper route. Between it and a later job at Earl Schieb (ANY CAR, ANY COLOR, JUST $29.95), I bought my first car, a 1949 Hudson Pacemaker that wouldn't go over 60 MPH off a cliff with a tailwind with Satan in pursuit. #2 car was another story. That was a 1953 Hudson Hornet. It would go over 60. And how!!!

    I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane.
    Posted 1 year ago #
  12. flanative

    flanative

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    I picked oranges when they were in season and picked truck crops when they came in....didnt kill me!

    Posted 1 year ago #
  13. admin

    Kevin

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    I delivered The Home News in North Brunswick, New Jersey.

    I had a moped that my dad rigged up with two removable baskets I could put on the sides to hold the papers. I drove that thing like a maniac and wiped out on someone's slippery lawn one day with newspapers flying everywhere.

    Old people would get pissed at me when their Sunday Morning papers didn't show up until noon.

    Then I figured out that the delivery truck actually dropped them off between 1 - 2 am.

    So I would watch Saturday Night Live, then Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, then deliver the Sunday morning papers, zipping around on my moped at 3 am.

    Old people were happy, and the 15-year old got to sleep until noon and no one complained.

    Great memories when I had not a care in the world.

    Check Out Our Sister Site - Cigar Chronicles

    Certified Master Tobacconist (CMT) #1858
    Posted 1 year ago #
  14. duncan

    duncan

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    Since I grew up in the Funeral industry I had a job digging graves at the local cemetary. After the first month I realised that when I went home and the second shift came in they used the backho that I didnt know existed. To think I would dig 1 to their 3 and I thought I was a slackass. I did get them back one night, pulled the hydraulic lines and hid them so they had to do some labour. To this day the when old guy sees me he tries to hand me a shovel while laughing.

    Why does it seem that todays youth has added lead paintchips to their daily diet!?!
    Posted 1 year ago #
  15. hobie1dog

    hobie1dog

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    no paper routes for me....mowed shitloads of yards though....graduated to mowing a Cemetary all 4 summers of High School...and we had clipped around every marker and stone......no stinkin weed eaters invented back then

    Marry the right person, this one decision will determine 90% of your happiness.

    Does a culture based on seperation and competition, of scientific sophistication and mideval religion, offer happiness even as it ravishes the Earth that sustains it?
    Posted 1 year ago #
  16. lordnoble

    lordnoble

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    I didn't get a job until I was 17, but I was working every weekend from the time I was 12 until I was 17 on the addition my parents put on the house. I HATED every weekend because I had to get up at 8am and I worked 'til 4 or 5pm (sometimes earlier if the game was on). I remember thinking, "Why do I have to put all of these f*%^ing electrical boxes in? I'm not going to be an electrician! I'm going to have so much money I'm going to hire people to fix my house when I grow up!" Needless to say, I have only ONCE hired someone to "fix my house" and that's only because I didn't think I didn't like the idea of playing with the main power line coming into my house. I've run new gas lines, electrical wiring, put in insulation, repaired cracked sidewalks all thanks to those countless weekends when I had to help my Dad.

    Mark Twain once wrote, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.”

    Funny how a little age can so dramatically change one's perspective

    -Jason

    unclearthur on high nicotine blends:
    A few will leave you wandering around wondering who you are .
    Posted 1 year ago #
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    briarbrian

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    I had one, wasnt lucky enough to have dad drive me in the rain though, had to do it rain sleet sun or snow. I loved that route when I was a kid. I just rode my bike and delivered to about 50 houses or so.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  18. bubbadreier

    Bubba

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    My first job was at a carwash and quick lube combination.... I was 13 years old and have held a full time job since then. The longest period of time I have ever gone without a full time job since then has been a total of two weeks!

    Mason jars and bale top jars, mason jars and bale top jars.... that is all!

    "There’s truth in the statement that pipe tobacco will never be any less expensive than it is today, so think of your cellar as a cost averaged investment" - G.L. Pease
    Posted 1 year ago #
  19. colonelmcmuf

    colonelmcmuf

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    I was a lawnmower myself. It's one of the few jobs that a 12 year-old can still do.

    "Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight. Gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight!"
    Posted 1 year ago #
  20. excav8tor

    excav8tor

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    Nice one Jason, and here's a similar one by Charles Wadsworth 'By the time a man realises that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong'.

    I had a paper round as a kid but it only lasted a couple of weeks because I found another job that paid more with less hours. More than that, I didn't have to get up at ridiculous o'clock in the morning

    "A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth." - C.S. Lewis
    Posted 1 year ago #
  21. classicgeek

    classicgeek

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    I had a paper route. The local daily paper, the Victoria Times-Colonist. Held that down for just over a year when I was 14. Had to get up at five every morning to get them delivered before seven. Was a good experience and part of the job was collecting the money every two weeks. That was the part that Dad drove me around for. He thought nothing of sending his firstborn out alone in the predawn rain, but didn't want to see me rolled for the paper money.

    Gave it up when I was old enough to pump gas. That was a completely different kind of learning experience. The paper route was healthier.

    Followed by three years in a bakery. I'm still trying to lose the weight...

    Simon

    Posted 1 year ago #
  22. searock

    searock

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    I have a route when I was 12 or 13. They would deliver our paper bundles to a car wash where all us paper boys met. The bundles were tied with wire and we would cut it off so we could roll the pagers. With all that wire around we "had" to find some bad use for it, after all we were kids. So, we would sneak across the street to the gas station, go in the men's room, ram a wire up the condon machine, wiggle it and out would come a bunch of rubbers. Then we filled them with water and had "balloon fights". Ah, those were the days!

    Posted 1 year ago #
  23. dudleydipstick

    dudleydipstick

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    Searock wrote:

    we would sneak across the street to the gas station, go in the men's room, ram a wire up the condon machine, wiggle it and out would come a bunch of rubbers. Then we filled them with water and had "balloon fights". Ah, those were the days!

    When I was in elementary school, me and a buddy of mine would ride our bikes up to Swifty and get a couple rubbers, unroll them, spit hockers in them, and throw them on cars or stick them on antennas.

    Me and that same friend would call people at random sometimes and tell them that our parents left us at Theatre X (a local porno mecca) and that we were scared and needed someone to come and pick us up. They always agreed.

    I miss those days without *69 and caller ID.

    Posted 1 year ago #
  24. spacecowboy57

    spacecowboy57

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    lol dudly, i did similar things even when i was in college, although they give them out at the health center. My gf has a dick of a materials science teacher, so when she was taking his final, i filled a rubber with elmers glue and water, and slipped it over his office doorhandle. i could only imagine the b@st@rd walking back with an armload of papers and reaching for the door handle...

    Posted 1 year ago #

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