Did you ever have a paper route?

Did I ever have a paper route? Who comes up with these things? How many children actually have paper routes anymore? Isn’t like more Leave it to Beaver stuff?

I never had a paper route. But once again, I can figure out a way to provide a more thorough answer without having the experience, because although I never had a paper route, I have delivered papers.

This happened when I was working at the Tuttle Times. I was there for almost 10 years, and I was a writer, photographer, layout person, etc. Even sold a few ads once or twice. Jack-of-all-trades, if you will.

One thing I did not do was deliver papers.

But one day, there was a terrible storm coming. Big snowstorm sleety mess. I was innocently finishing up the newspaper at the Chickasha office, getting it ready to print. Lenora was over at the Epworth Christian Dayschool, where she went for the one day a week I was in Chickasha. She was little then…two years old or less, anyway.

After I got done with the newspapers, they would go through the big printing press. I liked to stick around until they printed, so I could see how it looked before I went home. Sometimes I didn’t wait, and just saw it when it was delivered to Tuttle the next day. This day I wasn’t planning on waiting – I wanted to get home early and beat the storm.

So I’m working away, and the lady who was in the charge of the circulation department comes over to me. See, it’s her job to deliver all of the papers to the Tuttle Post Office for mailing out the next morning. She lived in Moore, so she would go through Tuttle on Tuesdays to deliver those papers to the back dock. But she also wanted to go home on the turnpike so she could also beat the storm. So she asked me, since it was on the way for me anyway, if I could deliver those papers to the post office.

This was a hard question for me, because I did not want to do this. However, I also realized that she was a department head, and I tried very hard to do what they asked of me…you know, be a good employee and all that.

I tried to get out of it; I really did. I told her that I had to pick up Lenora, and I didn’t want to wait a long time for papers because I’d have her with me if a storm hit. But she assured me that the printing wouldn’t take long, and that there would surely be no problem and she basically made it clear that I was going to do this regardless and thank you very much.

So there I was.

After my part was done, I hung around at the basically empty office (everybody wanted to beat the storm) and listened to the radio talking about the weather. It sounded bad. I tried to call my boss to tell him my dilemma, but his phone didn’t pick up.

As 6 p.m. neared, I drove over to pick up Lenora. The school was like a ghost town. Everybody had picked their kids to…yeah, you know; to beat the storm. I strapped Lenora in her car seat and we went back to the newspaper office. The papers were finally printing.

Then they had to have inserts put in…and be labeled…and then Lenora and I got around to the side door and we started loading them in the car. Everybody was in a hurry because the storm was starting.

And then we left for Tuttle.

Obviously it was survivable because Lenora and I are still around and it’s quite a long time later, but it was bad. It was really bad. I have never driven in worse. I could not see the road. Everything was white. There were no other cars. Sometimes I could tell where the road was, but some of the time, I couldn’t. I just kept trying to go in a straight line. By the grace of God I could see the road in the curvy spots on the road.

I went about 15 miles an hour the whole way and saw no one. Four times my windshield froze up so much I had to get out and scrape it, even with the defroster on and the wipers going. They just froze right into the ice. I stopped the car right in the middle of the road and scraped it while praying no one would come skidding up behind us.

No cell phone, of course.

By the time I got to the post office, my fingers were numb and raw, my ears were ringing and my eyes were snow-blinded. I couldn’t go all the way to the back dock because it has a ramp, and I knew I’d never get back up it in the car, so I stopped in the parking lot and slid/crawled my way to the dock with all the papers. Then I made my way back to the car and made my way home.

Lenora slept during the horrible ordeal and was annoyed to be awakened to the blustery world when we got home. Lucky she slept – if she had been crying, and I hadn’t been able to focus, who knows what might have happened?

I was never so happy to go into my warm house, wrap up in a big blanket and pull my chair by the fire.

My memorable experience delivering papers.