Lessons Learned From Being a Paperboy

by admin | July 24, 2026 7:17 am

I was interviewed recently for East Texas Tonight, a 15-minute weekly show on KLTV, a television station based in Tyler. Host Kylie Neel did her homework and asked intelligent questions. I hope my answers were as nimble. I will leave that to viewers to judge, which you can do if you haven’t already by clicking here[1].

Kylie noted the wide variety of jobs I held, particularly in college, as I pursued a liberal arts degree, majoring in English, history and philosophy: bottle washer at Made-Rite, pizza delivery driver, steak cook at Bonanza, dog catcher for the City of Nacogdoches. (She didn’t go  into as much detail as I did here.) She asked what job taught me the most about human nature. My reply:

What taught me the most about human nature was being a paperboy, which is how I started at the Longview paper when I was 13 years old in 1968… That’s really what sparked my interest in journalism and newspapers.

I also noted that my degree didn’t actually qualify me for a particular job. I loved my time at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. Since I was paying for my education, there was no parental pressure to take courses that would make me more attractive in the job market. I believe the professors there helped shape my worldview, broadened my horizons, and gave me a solid foundation. To do what was the conundrum.

I told Kylie the original plan was to attend law school at UT-Austin. I took the LSAT and got accepted, then changed my mind and headed to graduate school in photojournalism at the University of Missouri. Money woes (out-of-state tuition) forced me to transfer to UT the following year. The rest is history…

Back to being a paperboy. I was essentially a door-to-door salesman, peddling the Longview Daily News — the afternoon edition — throughout downtown Longview and part of the neighborhood that surrounded it.

[2]We had moved to Longview from New Hampshire in June 1968. At the time, the Granite State was lily-white. It still largely is, with white folks making up 91 percent of the population. Allenstown, the small village where I was raised until nearly 13, was largely French-Canadian and Catholic, as were we, at least on my mom’s side of the family. Her maiden name was Bourque. The surnames of my friends included Courtemanche, Boudreau, Reslock, and Reneau. By contrast, Longview was racially diverse, though it was basically white and Black, with few Hispanics or Asians at the time. Catholics were a decided minority in Longview in the 1960s.

My paper route reflected not just the racial diversity but differences in income, culture, and dress. There were:

• Red-faced oilmen puffing on cigars or spitting in the general direction of stained spittoons on the floor of the Brass Rail while playing dominoes.
• Carefully coiffed women in dresses, cloaked in perfume, selling clothes at Riff’s and Dillard’s, both downtown.
• Serious day drinkers whiling away the hours at the Magnolia Saloon, which had a hard-packed red-dirt floor and a magnolia tree growing out of its roof. Nearly 60 years later, that magnolia tree is still there on Tyler Street, though the building is gone.
• Nearby, Kelly Plow was one of my scarier stops. Its roaring furnaces and clanking din made me nervous as I walked through, trying to sell papers for a dime apiece. (I got to keep half.) The men’s faces were usually caked with soot. Smoke invariably filled the building.
• A string of shotgun houses along Green Street, where Black residents sat often on the front porch because they had no air conditioning. They were some of my kindest customers.
• Bored car salesmen down at the Ford and Chevrolet dealerships that faced off on Spur 63, the farthest point on my route, which I reached on my banana-seat bicycle.

I learned to talk to people from wildly different backgrounds and stations in life during my years as a paperboy, before I managed to talk my way into a part-time job as a photographer and darkroom flunky at the paper. I was (still am) naturally shy and quiet, but this was my first sales job. Since these were not subscribers, I had to deliver a brief sales pitch, often highlighting the lead story or a sports piece on an upcoming Lobos football game. I sold papers to people for whom a dime was literally pocket change, and to others who had to decide whether today’s edition was worth one of the few dimes in their pockets.

My middle brother Scott inherited my route when I joined the photo department as its by-far junior member. After he watched the television clip, he emailed to say he had recently been asked the same question about influences and had given the same answer.

“It was a great experience,” he wrote.

It really was.

Source URL: https://garyborders.com/pages/lessons-learned-from-being-a-paperboy/

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