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

[pstlpkr]

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?

 

[spacecowboy57]

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.

 

[pstlpkr]

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.

 

[igloo]

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 .

 

[ernest]

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.

 

[spacecowboy57]

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

 

[pstlpkr]

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

 

[wallbright]

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.

 

[unclearthur]

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

 

[juni]

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.

 

[chuckw]

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!!!

 

[flanative]

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

 

[admin]

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.

 

[duncan]

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.

 

[hobie1dog]

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

 

[lordnoble]

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

 

[briarbrian]

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.

 

[bubbadreier]

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!

 

[colonelmcmuf]

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

 

[excav8tor]

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