Detroit in the 70’s wasn’t as glamorous as many like to imagine. After the riots of 1967 the city settled into a long sleep, a somnambulance of motion without sound, like the vehicles that passed under the bridges over I-94 in a foot of fresh snow. People came and went silently, mostly went.
Motown still had a number of hits to come, but Barry Gordy, the founder, moved the studio to Los Angeles after the riots. They continued to call it the ‘Motown Sound’. At that point Detroit would hungrily accept any gesture as an accolade, and boast about it endlessly. We fell hard, we couldn’t get up and we collected whatever meager mentions we heard and held on to them like unabashed compliments.
We won nothing in the 70’s. Our teams were hollow, like the city. We had one great year in 1968, after the riots, when Denny McClain won 31 games and the Tigers took the World Series in 7 games against the St. Louis Cardinals. But the 70’s yielded no great teams. The Lions, Pistons, Tiger and Red Wings, like the city they represented, were whispers of their former greatness.
The evacuation of the city, as the wise guys called it, was so pervasive in the 70’s that one city councilman suggested closing the outbound lanes of the freeways, and only half in jest.
For myself, the changeover of our neighborhood was a small windfall. I took over my Detroit Free Press paper route in December of 1971, at age 11. I had 60 daily/Sundays and maybe 10 Sunday only. The Sunday only crowd just wanted the TV Guide, and maybe the comic strips. If I had access to a pile of TV Guides every week, I could have paid for college. By the time I gave up the route in 1975 I had 160 daily/Sundays and 40 Sunday only. I could no longer put all of the papers on a bike and ride it. I was clearing $60/week by then. Not bad for a 12 or 13 year old.
On Sundays the size of the Classified sections increased tenfold, and I wasn’t able to use the bike at all. I invested in a Red Ryder wagon. The Free Press sold these at cost, so it was a good deal. I had to put 6 packs of papers, 30 to a pack, into the wagon and tie them with twine to keep them from spilling out. And there was no way to fold and throw, so each paper had to be set inside of a screen door, or into a milk chute. It took 3 full hours with travel time to deliver on Sunday.
So cash flow was good, but after the new wagon I made no more investments in the route. Things change fast in business. I had a young couple with a daily/Sunday one week, and the next week as I went to deliver the Sunday, the door was open wide. They were gone and someone had broken into the house. On another day that summer I woke up a bit late, it was already light out, so about 6:00 AM. Panicked I rode to my paper drop like a boy possessed only to find the building next to my drop in flames. There were three fire engines and Harper Avenue was closed. I tried to make my way across the hoses to get the papers, but a fireman stopped me. They were soaking wet anyway. My station manager showed up and gave me enough to get started, then met me on the route and we finished up delivery together. Again, the following winter the liquor store on the corner burnt down; and while I folded papers the next day the police arrested two guys who broke through the plywood and filled a large garbage bin with full bottles, but they didn’t calculate the weight and were an easy collar as they tried to pull the bin down the street.
The individual customers on my route were a mixed bag, mostly good working class families. One group that I soon detested were the hippies. They moved in en masse when houses wouldn’t sell and homeowners decided to rent. They smoked a lot, sometimes tobacco, and their places always reeked. Theirs were the only houses I refused to set foot in when invited during inclement weather. I had one house at the very end of Coplin, right next to the bridge over 94 entrance, with a group of hippies on each floor. I went to place the Sunday paper behind the screen door and the front door opened wide. I bent over to pick up the paper to try it again and noticed the inside door was also opened. There was a naked girl laying on the floor, motionless, her bum looking right at me. That scared me and I left the paper where it lay and got the hell out of there. I collected later that day and never delivered there again. The only time I quit a customer.
There was always drama around the hippies, some domestic disturbance, lots of yelling and swearing, and loud music. They liked loud music.
Another time, in winter, a hippie who lived in the apartment above my paper drop ran out onto the street naked, screaming nonsense. He chased another paperboy a couple of doors down before he turned around and came after me. I made it across the street but my heavy winter boots slowed me down. I had my paper bag in my hand, and the two heavy steel clips we pushed into the handlebars to secure the bag, hung from the strap. I turned and swung; I let him have it, right across his brow, the pointed, jagged end of the clip caught him like a hook catches a fish. He held his eye and fell backwards into a pile of gray snow and ice. I and the other boy grabbed our papers and got the hell out of there, fast. I thought for sure that he’d call the cops. Of course he didn’t.
My friend Trent and I, Trent was also a paperboy but with a different drop, saw the injured long hair the following Saturday with a plate of sunny side up eggs at the diner. I froze but he didn’t seem to recognize me at all. Your brain on drugs I guess. The gash down his forehead above his eye was an ugly scab. We sat there and ate fries and a milkshake; he eventually left, walking right behind us. “Drug scab,” was his new nickname. We laughed at him mercilessly from then on, the first adult we ever thought to mock.
One Saturday, on my way to collect on my route, I took a shortcut through an alley. In Detroit the alleys ran down the middle of every block and often a garage backed up to the alley from the houses on both sides. I came across two guys in white tunics fighting judo style in their backyard. I decided to spend a minute watching this exhibition, martial arts were a craze at the time. When I got off my bike and went to stand it against the back of a garage I stepped on something that moved. I jumped out of the way, “whoa.” It was a man in a dark suit, the back of his head and neck covered with dried blood, part of his gray face eaten away. The fighters came over to their fence to see what happened, and then called the police. Soon cops taped off the scene and a van came with men in white coats. They hauled away the body, the fighters got back at it, and I left to collect the route. The next day the paper had a story about the man. He owned a flooring store, selling carpet and linoleum, about 50 miles away. He was executed, Pops said.
The worst story during this time was about a girl who had a route. She opened a screen door to drop in the Sunday paper and somebody thought it was a break in and shot through the door, and killed her. Saturday night drinking ended horribly. I read about it in the paper. She was the only girl I ever heard of with a route. I had mixed feelings after that about putting the paper behind the screen door.
Things fall apart, and my route fell apart even as I made money. Collecting was a pain, that never changed. People actually pretended not to be home, but I learned to catch the slightest movement in the window blinds or drapes. Then I would persist, knocking and ringing, until they gave in and handed over the cash. It was only a $1.25 my last two years.
And it was the money that kept me going; it was a lot of fun to have cash like that when your 13 or 14. Sundays were the best. After I finished the route I stopped at home and quickly put together the cash I needed to pay the paper bill, about $100 or so from Saturday’s collection. Then it was onto the square, concrete block bunker, they called the station, on Harper to pay the manager, Mr. Delaurio. Afterwards I’d meet up with other paperboys at Gate’s Diner next door. We sat at the counter and smoked cigarillos, ate the 5/$2 bucks sliders and fries and argued about sports or music. It wasn’t the typical scene from Boy’s Life magazine, but it was my first taste of life, of independent life, where you made your own table and sat down to enjoy it. I knew some of the other boys from school, and there were others whom I knew from the teams of other schools, and some boys I just got to know at the counter. I admired the boys who knew how swear, who carried their cash in a neat fold like a man, and who said things like “I don’t fuckin’ care if some low life moves out and screws me, long as I’ve got money for lunch and smokes.” At the time, it sounded right.
Other times I’d stop at a bakery on the way home from the station. There was a Syrian bakery not far from the station where a lady in a headscarf would give us a fresh, warm flatbread from the oven and I’d buy a bag of 10 more to take home. Pops loved fresh Syrian bread. There was also an Italian bakery, Stellinos. If it was late enough we’d get a slice of Sicilian pizza, or raspberry jelly doughnuts with real raspberry filling. Life was good.
Just a few months short of my 15th birthday I quit the route; Christmas tips in my pocket, and a better job hopefully on the horizon, I decided I had enough of 5:00 AM wakeups.
I’ve often noted to myself that the route wasn’t the worst job I ever had. I really had no boss as long as I got out of bed and delivered the papers to the right homes; every once in a while I had an extra paper at the end of the route, which I would hear about from Mr. Delaurio. I got a glimpse into life and how people lived it, learned how difficult it can be to earn a living and how hard people hold onto their cash. It’s a struggle for resources, this life. I laugh when I read about how the newspaper business has a hard time getting customers to pay. It’s always been that way, but in the past the burden was passed on to boys with routes.