I woke up this morning in a motel on First Avenue, Coralville and got to watch the sun rise in the hills on the Iowa River just to the east, looking back toward Iowa City. It so happens that sometime in the 1970's I was employed delivering newspapers to motels in Coralville and Iowa City, so it was a kind of coming home to me, only in this motel there is not a newspaper to be seen.
Back then, people would read them. They would drop quarters into a machine and take a newspaper out, then read it to find the daily news. These days I open up google news and read my news from a variety of sources, whatever google news links to, all free. The different organizations pester me (I actually prefer The Guardian, but don't pay for any of them), but I stay under the radar and just take what I need. It's partly because in those days I was used to all news being free to me as an employee.
I went down to this little hut down by the river which they used as a bundling house; that's what we called it. We would unload a truck at about 2 30 in the morning, and remove the wire ropes that secured them. We would then count out the bundles we needed and turn them, secure them, and put them in our truck. I had an old Suburban that was given to me to use by the boss. It had like 200,000 miles and was entirely reliable, and held lots of papers, which was especially useful on Sunday when we were doing major volume.
So these bundles, which resembled logs, would be marked by number and I'd know which one to throw on which curb, when I got way out to the suburbs in Coralville. But then on the way back, after cruising all those empty, dark, deserted streets out in the suburbs, I'd come back along First Avenue and hit all the motels. At the motels I had one of two missions; I'd either hand a specified number of newspapers to the clerk, or I'd put a slug in the machine, open it up, remove all of yesterday's papers, and put a specified number of papers in it instead. The old papers I'd bring back to the bundling house to use to wrap bundles. Or, of course, I was free to just keep one. I could take home as many of yesterday's papers as I wanted to. And I sometimes did, since I'd read the opinions or do the puzzles in the back.
It was a solitary kind of job. The other bundlers were friendly but difficult to be around - the guy next to me chewed tobacco and at three in the morning I found this kind of repulsive. But he was friendly to me; so were the people in the motels. The guy that showed me the route, the tobacco chewer, got way out into the Coralville suburbs and went the wrong way on streets, etc. and said that at 3 in the morning nobody cared and they all knew who he was and why he was doing it. It was essentially so you could maneuver around to where dropping the bundle was easier, and you didn't have to get out of the Suburban to do it. Sure enough a policeman saw us and did nothing. I was impressed and did the same when I got the route.
But one night I was out there breaking the law, maneuvering the car so I could drop the bundle, and I made some kind of mistake which caused me to run over this curb. It was rather dramatic but it was just a mistake and I could do nothing but keep on going and doing what I was doing, going the wrong way. A policeman saw it and pulled me over.
I explained to him that I was a bundle dropper and that I went the wrong way because it was 3 30 in the morning and I figured it was ok in the abandoned streets as they were. Surprisingly he said he knew all about that and in fact he'd been watching me do that for a long time; he knew the last guy but didn't know me. He was just pulling me over to make sure I was ok, because the curb-jumping was kind of uncharacteristic and at this time of night there were a lot of drunks out here doing basically the same thing. I had to laugh at that. I think he was kind of doing it just to meet me and get a scan on my general personality, like he'd feel better watching me break the law routinely if he knew who I was.
Some of the guys would get paper routes when their driving was over, so that they'd do bundle dropping 2 30-5 30 and then paper route 5 30-7. This added together made almost an income you could live on but it was a gruelling schedule. I got a school bus driving job and would work 7-8 and then again 2 30-3 30 - you can see easily that this made it hard to sleep any time except after 3 30. It was odd sleeping then and I was often interrupted, especially if I wanted to do anything else. Messing with my sleep schedule proved to be a serious error but that's another story.
Once the Pope came to Iowa and his story was all over the front page. This was important because, in making a log out of a stack of papers, your eye would fall on the same word or words repeatedly as those words came around the fold of the paper.
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