At various times as a kid growing up in Long Island NY, I was a Long Island Press or Newsday paper boy in Freeport NY. My bike was a monstrosity my father and I built from parts of bikes people threw away by putting out on the curb for the Wednesday "big trash" pickup. The frame and front wheel was from a 26" 5 speed bike with a trashed derailleur, so we put a single speed rear wheel on and got rid of the shifters. I put "butterfly handlebars" on to hold the newspaper bag and some huge seat from another bike, and the knobbiest tires I could find because of biking in the winter snow. It was not a chick magnet!

First I delivered the LI Press as a morning paper but switched to Newsday as an afternoon paper that I could delivery after school. Newsday also had no Sunday edition at the time, which gave me a day off. My friend and I took 2 routes each, about 100 papers each at 30 cents per week per customer. If I remember right, I got to keep 6 cents per customer and the distributor got 24 cents, so 100 papers was $6/week from him and about $10/week in tips from customers, all in quarters and dimes! You had to pay the distributor guy in bills, so we would have to go to a local store and exchange coins for cash - I don't remember any bank branches anywhere near where I lived.

Collecting from the customers, starting on Thursday, was always annoying but I think was a great lesson in running any business! Halloween was great if it fell on Thurs/Fri or Saturday - lots of candy. The tips around Christmas time were a bonanza as well and enabled me to buy my first "real" bike, a Schwinn Varsity.

I rode that bike throughout high school (no more paper route) before I got my driver's license, until one night at a beer drinking session in South Freeport near one of the canals, a friend did an Evel Kneivel on it, riding off a pier into the canal at night. I guess the water was deeper than we thought (if we had been thinking...) - we never found the bike, it may still be down there...