Working Man - Part I - Paperboy

Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

Since I am on the six-month countdown to retirement, I thought that a retrospective of my working life might be in order. The image that I included shows a man working on a computer, which describes some of my work life, but I'm finishing up my work life toiling away in my third major industry, and computers didn't come along until I was well into it.

I started out delivering newspapers in my neighborhood. Had a few summer jobs, one in the police department and one for a Wall Street firm in the mailroom. I worked in a full service gas station through high school. Unloaded trucks at a home improvement store and sold plants in the garden center of a department store. Did data entry for a stock broker. Apprenticed as a glass cutter and took care of old folks in a nursing home. Washed dishes and flipped burgers. Worked in the back room of a pizza restaurant cutting up toppings and making pizza dough and drove a truck driving the supplies to different restaurants. Stocked groceries and managed the night crew. Supervised paper carriers. Was an auditor at a big newspaper and was called a "paper pushing, number crunching son of a bitch" by someone I took to court. Back to stocking groceries and worked my way up to store director. Finished up as a senior revenue analyst working for state government. So far!

My first job was as a newspaper carrier for the Long Island Press, an afternoon daily with Long Island, New York circulation. Back in those days, and up through at least the eighties, newspapers were mainly delivered by grade school kids riding their bicycles through their immediate neighborhood. My memory is a little foggy, but it seems like I had around 40-50 customers. There was a little distribution office, not much more than a shack, near the Long Island Railroad station on Francis Lewis Blvd just north of North Conduit Ave. You'd bike up to the "office", which was about 10 blocks from our house on 255th Street, and pick up your papers and head over to your route area to deliver them. A lot of paperboys walked their routes with the official canvas newspaper bag slung over their shoulder; I had a wire rack attached to the front of my bike that held all my papers. It clamped onto the handlebars and was stabilized by two struts attached to the front wheel. It could easily hold 50 rolled-up and rubber-banded newspapers during the week, but since Sunday papers were so gargantuan, it usually took a few trips. I remember one morning, after loading up my Sunday papers, seeing the bike tip over from the weight!

Customers were not billed through the central office, as they are today, but carriers were responsible for collecting, in person, from their customers. The price of seven days of home delivery was 90¢. That broke down as 10¢ per day Monday - Saturday and 30¢ for Sunday. I had a little book where I would keep track of my customers and what service they received (Daily Only, Sunday Only or Daily-Sunday) and marked down when they paid each week. Most customers gave me a dollar, which included a 10¢ tip - with the big spenders forking over $1.25! I had one particularly grumpy customer - Mrs. Diamond - who was very particular about where I left her paper and usually paid me in nickels and dimes - never any tip!

Newspaper carriers then as now, are considered independent contractors. We bought our papers from the Long Island Press distributor and paid him per subscription. The paperboy (or girl) was the only contact that the customer had with the newspaper. Nobody was calling to get you to renew your subscription or take advantage of their special offers. And of course there was no "online" option. I have no memory of what we paid or what our "profit" was, but I must have thought it worth it to do every day (no days off!). We were supposed to pay the distributor every Saturday after we did the bulk of our collecting Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. After my first week I pedaled up to the office to pay my bill. The distributor's assistant was there. In retrospect he was probably around 17-18 years old, but he seemed pretty intimidating to me. When I asked him what I owed, he asked me "What do you have?". When I told him, he said that was what I owed. I reported this conversation to my dad, who took me back to the office to confront the guy. As it turned out, the amount of money that I had on hand did coincidently correspond to what I owed for the week. The distributor explained to Dad and me how the bill was calculated, so in subsequent weeks I would be able to calculate for myself what I owed. 

Eventually the Long Island Press went out of business and I got a paper route in the same general area with the New York Daily News. There were a few differences, the main one being that it was a morning paper, so there was no sleeping in during the summer and I had to get my route done before leaving for school. Our papers were delivered to our driveway (by this time my brother and at least one cousin also had routes) and the distributor came around every week to collect. I was moving in to my last few years of grade school (our Catholic School was grades 1- 8; we didn't have a junior high or middle school) and, not to put too fine a point on it, I was pretty lazy. I didn't like getting up early, I didn't like having to go around and collect money from people. I would put off collecting, and only go around when I didn't have enough money to pay my bill. If the weather was bad I would dump my papers somewhere rather than finish delivering. I had a terrible work ethic. 

Overlapping with my last two years before high school I worked summer jobs in Manhattan. The summer I turned 13 my father lined me up with a summer job at the New York City Police Department. (Dad was a NYPD officer at the time) I was employed as a clerk in the Pistol License Division, which was responsible for issuing and renewing handgun permits for "Special Patrolmen" (SP's), i.e. those who had jobs like security guards which required them to be armed. For the officers in this unit, it was far from a prestige posting. In fact, it was called the "Bow and Arrow Squad", because all the cops in division had their guns confiscated for various reasons and were consigned to desk duty. I spent my days going through files of index cards, looking for SP's whose licenses were expiring and making appointments to get them renewed. When I called SP's I always identified myself as "Tom Joyce, calling from the New York City Police Department". My voice had recently changed and over the phone I sounded like an adult. People calling back would ask for "Officer Joyce", which caused much hilarity among the actual officers. It was far from exciting, but it was my first "real" job. It was minimum wage, which then was $1.65/hour, but I received a "real" paycheck, worked with grownups and commuted to work by bus and subway from our home on the fringe of Queens to One Police Plaza in Manhattan. 

The following summer our neighbor around the corner lined me up a job as a mailroom clerk in a financial services firm, Alliance Capital Management, a subsidiary of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, a major player on Wall Street. Still not exciting, but with delivering mail, making copies and functioning as an overall gopher, I stayed busy. Auggie DiBiasi, the  full-time mail room clerk, made things interesting. Long-haired, with muttonchop sideburns, he was as hippie as you can get while having to wear a tie at work. Throughout the day he had music going in our little mail room - he convinced me to buy Quadrophenia by The Who, which remains one of my favorite albums. 

What was more interesting than the work was the lunch breaks. The office where I worked was just a few blocks from Wall Street, and I could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center from our building. On my lunch break I would often wander down to Wall Street where there was always some street theater to be had at The Federal Building. One of the regulars was an elderly street preacher called Crazy Willie. He would park his big Cadillac in front of Federal Hall across from the stock exchange and stand on the hood, preaching incoherently. I found out from my father that the same guy had been preaching at that corner 30 years previously, when Dad worked in Manhattan. This was all pretty interesting to me and was my first real exposure to non-mainstream religious thought, craziness notwithstanding! 

I'm not certain whether this job was in my first summer after my Freshman year of high school or the last summer before I started high school. At any rate, once the summer was over I started my first permanent, full-time job, pumping gas at a Getty Gas Station, which I did for around five years, through high school and into college.