Kurts First Job - Paperboy

It all started when I substituted on a paper route for my friend Ken when I was in grade school...

The paper was the now-defunct Western Sun. The time - from what I can recall - was 1974. The route had maybe 35 or 40 subscribers, and was spread across what is now Shoreline WA. In our neighborhood these type of paper routes no longer exist; whether it's for efficiency or safety reasons, I'll never know. But ask most parents these days if they would let their 10 year old kid go out at 6am on a Saturday alone and they will say "Absolutely Not!" Things sure have changed in 30+ years.

Things were good on the Western Sun route; the money was easy, and the work was generally simple. You had to have a good memory to know where the papers went and what special circumstances that each customer liked ("Put it in my screen door" or "Put it under the mat"). It wasn't always easy however. To get from one part of this route to another, there was a hill through a vacant lot that I would ride my bike down and through a ditch. One rainy day, me and the bike slipped down that hill and into the watery ditch. My clothes, my bike, and most tragically my newspapers got soaked. I sat there and cried, knowing that I had just destroyed the very product I was tasked with selling. The rest of the route - about half of it - got wet papers. In the following days I endured several angry subscribers who felt no remorse at chewing out a 10-year old kid for delivering what they considered to be inferior product, and understandably so. But what was I to do? An elementary school kid doesn't have the words or the decision-making ability to sort out a situation like this, and I still remember it with much frustration - vividly, in fact, every time I have to use the wipers in the truck or sit on a wet motorcycle seat. That one day, from ditch dunk to delivery, stands as possibly the most compelling reason behind my hatred for rain.

Despite this incident I continued until Ken wanted the route back. Eventually I got my own Seattle Times route in 1978, and then added another when my friend Lance wanted out. I delivered about 75 papers daily through High School. In 1981, while working another job over the summer, my sister took the route for a while; she met her now-husband while delivering and the rest is history. Janice, you're welcome ;) After High School I added a 220-paper Seattle P-I delivery route to my schedule, which then made me an official professional paper boy. I did that for a year before taking a job at Minit-Lube.

And that's another story for another day!