When most people think of newspaper carriers, they usually picture a young boy on a bicycle in 1946, pedaling around and tossing bagged papers into people’s yards. Most probably don’t imagine a 21-year-old college student in an old Buick listening to science podcasts while folding papers into tubes. But believe it or not, the latter was how I spent the second half of my summer. In 2017, I was a contracted newspaper carrier.

To cut a long story short, after a car repair that set me back several hundred dollars, I found an ad looking for a paper carrier in a local newspaper from my hometown of York, Pennsylvania. I called them, sent in a resume, went in for an interview, and was asked to start that night. I spent two days riding along with my supervisor, Brian, and then I was on my own, working a daily shift for commission based on the number of papers I delivered.

My nights went like this: I drove down to the depot (a single storage unit in the middle of nowhere) at 1 am, picked up my stacks, and filled up my car with papers. I then followed a planned route through rural Pennsylvania for about 40 miles, tossing papers into yards or stuffing them into tubes according to the directions Brian gave me. On weekdays, I delivered two papers: the York Daily Record, which had previously been the morning paper, and the York Dispatch, which was once delivered in the evenings. Saturdays were Daily Record-only, but I also delivered the Lancaster Farming Journal, which frequently took me far off my weekday route down back roads and dirt driveways. (The fact that I heard Sam Hunt’s Body Like A Back Road about six times an hour on my local Top 40 station was nothing short of ironic.)

When I told my family and friends about my new job, they couldn’t believe it. “People still do that?” one person said. “Wait, so you get up at 2 am? You never get up early!” Well, that’s true. If you ever see me up before 9 am, something is probably wrong. But at this point, I had already been staying up until 3 or 4 am, since it was summer, and I didn’t need to be up in the morning. I just pushed that back a little further to 6 or 7, and slept during the day. It took some adjusting, especially since my room has a lot of windows, but I managed to make it work, although not without serious help from McDonald’s $2 mocha frappes.

Sundays were the worst – as you’re probably aware, the Sunday paper is not only larger than the dailies, it’s also more popular. In addition to tripling the size of the stacks of paper filling up my car, I also added several new stops to my route, some of which required going far out of the way. Thankfully, I had an extra hour to deliver on Sundays, but I still didn’t have a minute to spare. So of course, that would be the day my poor, little old lady of a car decided to get herself stuck in a ditch.

My predicament that day is a story of its own, and I could go on and on about the details of the night – the struggles of finding someone who was awake and sober at 3 am to help me, shoving old papers into the ditch in a fruitless attempt to give my suspended tire some traction, the tow truck that just so happened to drive past me after a AAA call up the street, my increasing sense that my car is haunted by a benevolent trickster ghost that may or may not be my great-grandmother – but I digress. Suffice it to say that I didn’t finish my route until about 11 am, at which point I had to go home and eat lunch before my 1:30 call time for the theatre production I was a part of. Good times.

Overall, aside from that one little hiccup, my summer as a newspaper carrier felt like a journey back in time. I got to see the inner workings of the newspaper industry, which most people don’t even think about. I drove through wealthy communities, rural back roads, and huge farms of all kinds. I learned how hard it is to find a place to go to the bathroom at 2 am in rural Pennsylvania. I had 4-6 hours a day where, once I learned my route well enough, I could let my mind wander anywhere it wanted to–I actually had to pull my car over once to write down a story idea I got while doing my route. And, of course, I had a whole new experience that came with a wealth of stories to share. Would I do it again? I don’t know. Working every day was tough, and I’m not so sure my old car can take another month of that kind of abuse. But I am glad I had the experience, and I’m happy to be able to share my insight with others.