The Paperboy’s Secret
My first job in journalism—long before I knew that I wanted to write, and decades before I became a foreign correspondent—was delivering newspapers for the Columbia Missourian. I started at 5 A.M. on February 1, 1979, during one of those cold, snowy winters that used to be common in mid-Missouri. The front page featured a photograph of two local children playing in the snow, and a fifty-four-point headline carried news from a distant world: “TRIUMPHANT KHOMEINI RETURNS TO TEHRAN.” The paper consisted of thirty-four pages, and had a cover price of fifteen cents. Along with my older sister, Amy, I folded the newspapers and set out with a list of addresses. Our father accompanied us on the first day, but after that we were on our own.
Amy and I planned to share the route, and our earnings would help pay the fees at a summer camp. At the age of nine, I was probably too young to deliver papers, but Amy, at thirteen, was almost certainly too old. She was striking, with black hair, a fair complexion, and cat-green eyes; people noticed Amy wherever she went. During the spring, we alternated paper-route days, but I could tell that she didn’t enjoy it. A few times, she woke me at 5 A.M., claimed to be sick, and asked me to substitute. I noticed that Amy tended to feel bad on Wednesdays and Sundays, when the paper was heavy with extra ads and special sections.
We had always gotten along well, perhaps because our personalities were so different. Amy was easygoing and extroverted, and I was not; she thrived at school, which I hated. Almost everything that my sister disliked about the paper route was something that appealed to me. I liked waking up early, and I liked the repetition. I liked the fresh smell of the newspapers that were dropped off in a stack every morning at the end of our driveway. I liked the official paperwork: the stop notices, the new-subscriber slips. The Missourian’s circulation department sent these forms in white envelopes that read:
Mostly, I liked the silence and solitude. Back then, in a small Midwestern city, almost nobody exercised before dawn, and dog-walkers were rare. The one I saw most frequently was on the address list that I had memorized: Glenn Wood, 110 South Garth Avenue. The first time I did the route alone, he was out in front of his house with his dog. He introduced himself, and he told me that the dog was named Sadie. Then he gave me a quarter.
I came home excited. The route paid a little more than a dollar a day, so a quarter tip was significant. A couple of days later, Mr. Wood gave me another quarter. When I mentioned his name to my parents, they recognized him as the city clerk who signed municipal notices that appeared in the paper. He was in his early sixties, and part of his face was covered with a large purple birthmark. My mother referred to such discolorations, in respectful terms, as “raspberries”—a quiet woman at our church had a similar blemish. Like all physical deformities, raspberries were a sign of inner goodness, or at least that was an idea I had picked up from the Bible and from things the priest said in sermons.
Mr. Wood also greeted Amy on her paper mornings, but he rarely tipped her. It was unusual for an adult to show more interest in me; even at nine, I recognized that Amy possessed some magnetism that I lacked. After a while, I stopped mentioning the quarters, because I worried that Amy might demand half the money. In truth, she wasn’t likely to do such a thing, but that would have been my own response, so it seemed prudent to protect against it.
In July, Amy and I spent all our paper-route earnings to attend the camp, which was in Minnesota. A number of older boys developed crushes on Amy there, and I was rushed to the emergency room to receive stitches after slicing my left wrist open with a scalpel during a crafts unit. I had never seen so much blood; I could tell that the two young counsellors who drove me to the hospital were terrified. Not long after we returned home, Amy quit the paper route. By now, I was ten, and smart enough to recognize that only a sucker would work all year to send himself away in the summer. I never went back to camp, and eventually I decided on two goals of my own. I wanted to become Carrier of the Year, and I wanted to save enough money to buy a car when I turned sixteen.
On many mornings, I saw Mr. Wood. He often asked about school and sports, and he told me that he had been a baseball coach and a Boy Scout leader. He was active in the local Methodist church. At some point, he started putting the quarters into my pocket himself. He would press close, and put his arm around me, and then I would feel his hand inside my pocket. I sensed that this wasn’t right, but it happened so subtly that I couldn’t even say how it began. After a while, it became almost normal. Like the quarters, this was something I didn’t mention when I got home.
Columbia had around sixty thousand residents, and it was home to two competing papers, with the Daily Tribune delivered in the afternoon. Both papers announced Carrier of the Year in October, to commemorate International Newspaper Carrier Day. This occasion was often marked by an official proclamation from the city’s mayor:
During my third year, my friend Eric Neuner won Carrier of the Year. The Missourian published a picture of Eric receiving his award from James Kirkpatrick, the Missouri secretary of state. Eric was a year older than me, a good athlete and a voracious reader. He was the only other carrier I knew who read almost everything in the newspapers he delivered. That had become part of my morning routine: halfway through folding papers, I took a break to read the sports section, and then, after I got home, I tried to finish the newspaper at breakfast. I skimmed most political and international news, but I read everything about local accidents, arrests, and scandals. I loved the syndicated “Dear Abby” column, especially the headlines:
The first step toward becoming Carrier of the Year was to win Carrier of the Month. Candidates were disqualified if they received more than four customer complaints, and they had to participate in subscription drives. In the afternoons, I went door to door, trying to persuade people to take the Missourian. I learned that, despite my shyness, I was good at selling. I liked the nervousness I felt after pushing a strange doorbell, knowing that I would have to perform my sales pitch.
It took me a little more than a year to win Carrier of the Month. The announcement appeared on March 8, 1980, on page 3, along with the international headlines:
The article included a photograph, along with my grade and home address. In those days, publishing such details wasn’t considered risky for a child; the paper did the same thing for its Safe Bike Rider of the Week feature. The article about my award noted that I stood just four feet three inches tall, and it quoted a subscriber. “He’s so tiny that some mornings his papers drag,” she said. “He’s a swell little fellow.” I received a free haircut from Fantastic Sam’s, a banana split from Baskin-Robbins, and five dollars.
Size was my worst handicap as a carrier. I was so small that I had been held back in school, but even with a year’s advantage I remained among the shortest in my grade. I was naturally coördinated, and I believed that I was one of the fastest folders in the history of paperboys. Each step of the process—grab the paper, fold it twice, wrap the rubber band—was so quick and fluid that I imagined my hands as a Road Runner blur. Carriers often became obsessed with speed and efficiency. Eric, who was much bigger than me, rigged a bike with saddlebags to balance his load. My friend Brian Fick bought a Casio digital watch and timed how long it took him to bicycle his route every morning. Brian decided to skip the rubber bands, using instead the plastic bags that the Missourian gave us for rainy days, because he believed that they slid more quickly out of the canvas sack.
My route was hilly, and I carried more than forty papers. Nowadays, it’s easy to forget how large newspapers used to be. A page from the Missourian was two inches wider and nearly three inches longer than a page from today’s New York Times, and the typical Sunday Missourian, with sixty or more pages, weighed about a pound. I couldn’t handle such weight on a bike, so I walked, cutting through yards and finding gaps in fences and hedges. If I passed through the neighborhood later in the day as a civilian, I recognized thin ribbons of worn yellow grass crossing the green lawns. I was the only person who knew what those ribbons represented—the secret ways I walked every morning.
Most of the year, apart from summer, I delivered in darkness. Lights went on in certain houses at certain times, and I could tell if I was running late by the patterns of illuminated windows. In one Carrier of the Month feature, the Missourian quoted the winner (Mike Wagner, twelve years old, 2 Lucerne Court). “I get to see things other people don’t see,” Wagner said, without elaborating. I felt the same way, although I also had a horror-fascination with the idea that someday I would come across a dead body. In addition to winning Carrier of the Year, Eric Neuner achieved renown when he stumbled upon a trail of blood early one morning on Edgewood Avenue, after somebody had injured himself trying to break into a car. The paper occasionally ran stories about crimes or fires that had been reported by Missourian carriers. (January 12, 1982: “YOUTH TIPS OFF POLICE TO THEFT AT WIDOW’S HOME.”)
One morning, I was taking a shortcut beside a house on South Garth Avenue when I happened to see a high-school student getting dressed inside. The boy was a year older than Amy, who I knew found him cute. He stood in his underwear in front of a low window. We were about ten feet apart, separated by the pane of glass, and I froze. Then, very carefully, I tried to walk away. But he must have heard something, and his head snapped up. For an instant, it felt as though our eyes met. I hoped that it was only my imagination—I knew it was hard to see outside from a lit room.
The following morning, the window had been covered with a makeshift curtain. For days, I feared that the boy’s parents would complain to the paper or to my parents. The headlines had made it clear that people could get arrested for such things. (November 23, 1980: “PEEPING TOM: AN OVERLOOKED PROBLEM THAT SHOULD BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.”) I prepared explanations—it wasn’t intentional, this is where I walk every morning—but I knew that nobody would believe me.
In boyhood, guilt was a constant companion. It tagged along wherever I went; there was always something I had done, some hidden mistake or private atrocity, that was on the verge of being discovered. I often got in trouble at school, usually for making other kids laugh in class, and I dreaded the angry notes that teachers included in my report cards. A couple of times, I shoplifted baseball cards from the local drugstore. I slipped a pack or two into my shorts, and then I paid for one at the counter, being sure to smile and make eye contact. It was easy, but afterward I felt bad, and I stopped before it became a habit.
I attended a small Catholic school, and periodically all the students were escorted into the church in order to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The screened confessional booths were situated in the back, but it was also possible to meet a priest face to face. Anybody who chose this option had to walk past the altar to the front of the church, where the priest waited in a small room. Perhaps because of this visibility, it became a point of pride for tough-minded boys to scorn the screens. In our opinion, only girls and weaklings slunk to the back; it felt good to stride before the congregation with your head high.
But once I was sitting across from the priest my courage evaporated. I mumbled through some ten-cent sins—I disobeyed my parents, I was mean to my sister—and got out as quickly as possible. On my way back to the pew, the guilt was still there, loping doggedly at my side.
A couple of times, I thought about mentioning Mr. Wood to the priest. Something in my mind shut off when he touched me: my body would freeze, and I would think about nothing until it was over and the quarter was safely inside my pocket. Mr. Wood smoked cigars, and the heavy scent was often on his clothes when he came close. Occasionally, he pretended to miss the pocket, and his hand slipped inside my pants. “Whoops!” he would say. “Sorry about that.” At those moments, I felt the touch of his fingers, and I flinched and pulled away.
He seemed to sense when I became too uncomfortable. A week or more might pass before he put his arm around me again, and during the interlude he remained friendly. He was the only person on the route who talked to me regularly. His children were much older than me, and I told myself that this was the source of his affection—he was a father, after all. His wife rarely joined him on his walks; the few times I met her, she didn’t say much. After a while, Mr. Wood asked if I wanted to earn some extra money on Saturdays. His fraternal lodge, the Odd Fellows, organized a group of boys who sold soft drinks at University of Missouri football games.
I decided not to say anything to the priest. I knew from the past that most of my worries turned out to be baseless. After I saw the high-school boy getting dressed, there wasn’t any fallout. Maybe he hadn’t recognized me, or maybe he just hadn’t thought much about it. In my experience, invisibility was part of childhood. It was like the illuminated windows on a darkened street—I saw more of other people than they could see of me.
My home was less than a mile from the campus of the University of Missouri. My father taught in the sociology department, and many professors, some of them well known, lived in our neighborhood. I delivered the paper to 408 Thilly Avenue, which belonged to an English professor and a fiction writer who had co-founded the Missouri Review. A famous biologist had built the house at 504 Westmount Avenue. My father told me that 106 West Lathrop Road, an old, slightly run-down two-story at the edge of the woods, had once been occupied by a strange, great man named Thorstein Veblen. According to my father, Veblen had lived in the basement, which he entered and exited through a window.
Whenever I passed the house, I imagined somebody clambering through the window wells. Veblen’s name was hard to remember, but I connected the house and its basement to the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” Long before I understood the term, I was taken with its poetry. That was true of many of my father’s work words: “methodology,” “longitudinal,” “social deviance.”
He used these terms casually, and he loved telling stories. If he heard something vivid or shocking, he couldn’t stop himself from repeating it, not even to a child. Because of my father, I knew that one house on my route, 703 Westmount Avenue, had been home to an alcoholic who killed himself in the attic. A few doors down, another man blew out his brains with a gun. Various other homes stood as narrative monuments to failed marriages and post-tenure crackups. To this day, if I think of a certain red brick house, I can hear my father describing how the professor who lived there suddenly started failing all his students for no reason. From an early age, I recognized that the university was a place where adults might behave erratically.
Thorstein Veblen was the kind of character who appealed to my father. Veblen, an economist and a sociologist, became famous after publishing “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in 1899. His social commentary reflected disgust with the unfettered capitalism of the Gilded Age, and his cynical aphorisms became widely quoted. (“Always and everywhere invention is the mother of necessity.”) Veblen taught at the University of Chicago, but he was let go on account of relentless philandering. The same thing got him dismissed from his next position, at Stanford. In 1911, with diminishing options, he arrived at M.U., where a former student headed the economics department. The former student found Veblen a job, and he let him live in the basement of his home on Lathrop.
An elderly colleague of my father remembered seeing Veblen on campus. He had been a thin, gloomy figure, and it was a mystery why women were attracted to him. A story the colleague told, which my father loved repeating, was that university officials warned Veblen that they were aware of his reputation for having seduced the wives of administrators at Stanford. They told him that such behavior would not be tolerated at M.U. “Oh, I’ve seen your administrators’ wives,” Veblen responded. “You have nothing to worry about.”
The story may have been apocryphal, but it rings true to descriptions in “Thorstein Veblen and His America,” a 1934 biography. The book gives a lively account of the six years that Veblen spent in Columbia, which he loathed. When the Chamber of Commerce offered a prize for a new city slogan, Veblen proposed that the town be described as a woodpecker hole in “a rotten stump called Missouri.” Veblen typically gave every student in his class the same grade, an M, or Medium, the equivalent of a C. If a student needed a higher mark for some scholarship or application, Veblen simply changed it. Once, administrators confronted him about the carelessness of his grading. “My grades are like lightning,” Veblen replied. “They are liable to strike anywhere.” The biography notes the same detail that captured my imagination as a child: Veblen went in and out of his basement apartment through a window.
As a graduate student, my father was mentored by a Chinese American sociologist named Peter Kong-ming New, who gave him some advice: Never accept an appointment as chair of your department. If anybody insists that you undertake some administrative task, do it so poorly that he never asks again.
My father followed this advice like the Gospel. He was a devoted teacher, and he liked research, but he refused to have anything to do with administration. In the various M.U. stories that he told, many of them funny and cynical, one of the ugliest words was “dean.” Other nasty names included “provost” and “chancellor.” In this respect, he followed a long tradition of social scientists who apply caustic commentary to their host institutions. At M.U., Thorstein Veblen had written a vicious screed about university administrations called “The Higher Learning in America.” He told a colleague that the subtitle would be “A Study in Total Depravity.” Unsurprisingly, M.U. declined to publish it.
By avoiding administrative duties, my father also guaranteed himself a low salary. He rarely received much of a raise, and anybody who read the Missourian knew that the university was struggling. (August 2, 1981, front page: “M.U. PAY PLUMMETS TO BIG EIGHT CELLAR.”) But this created little distress in our household. My religious mother liked to quote Matthew: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
I often heard that verse at Mass, but I wasn’t very old before I recognized that virtually nobody other than my parents took it seriously. My mother was critical of people who seemed grasping or financially ambitious, and she celebrated volunteerism. One of my parents’ highest aspirations for a child was to someday join the Peace Corps. They volunteered at the local mental hospital, and my father often took me to help out at a soup kitchen. When my school struggled to find a P.E. instructor, my parents agreed to teach it twice a week for no pay.
My father’s many stories never touched on personal finance. The topic bored him, and in any case there was nothing to talk about: he saved nothing and made no investments. My parents packed me and my three sisters into a beige AMC Hornet, a flagship of nineteen-seventies American automotive decline. After my youngest sister entered school, my mother returned to work in a manner that seemed calculated to generate the least possible income. She enrolled as a graduate student, spent years researching a thesis about nineteenth-century Jewish immigration to Missouri, and finally taught history as an adjunct at a small college.
In contrast, I was obsessed with money. The newspapers that I delivered were full of dollar signs: during the era of Carter and Reagan, the prime interest rate sometimes exceeded twenty per cent, and unemployment was as high as ten per cent. The Missourian ran a column called “Inflation Fighters,” which offered tips for home economy: cornmeal can be used as a facial cleanser; stale beer is good for setting hair; it’s better to fill a gas tank only halfway, because a lighter car gets better mileage. As the economy staggered along, “Inflation Fighters” became increasingly desperate: “Why waste money on tape when you can make your own? Muslin can be melted with one part oil, six parts wax and ten points resin to produce adhesive tape.”
Other carriers also fixated on money. The Missourian was delivered by more than sixty children, most of them boys, and periodically the paper sponsored an event for us at its office or at a local pizzeria. These get-togethers were often covered by the newspaper, and in photographs I am invariably in the front row, looking small and eager. One year, carriers were invited to a free movie at the Biscayne Theatre. Whoever organized this screening was smart enough to keep the aftermath out of the paper. The film was “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which, for a group of children who set out alone every morning before dawn, was unbelievably terrifying. I attended with Eric Neuner and his younger brother Paul, who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight. Paul dashed out of the theatre to vomit; recently, when I spoke with the brothers, they could recall specific scenes and actors with startling clarity. Eric told me that he had recurring nightmares about the movie well into adulthood.
The Neuners were among the most entrepreneurial of the carriers. They bought a lawnmower and subcontracted other kids to cut grass around the neighborhood. Paul was the first paperboy I knew who bought stocks. He invested with a child’s eye, purchasing shares in Coca-Cola and the Wrigley Company. After Paul acquired Coke stock, he forbade his family to consume Pepsi products. Each year, like all Wrigley investors, Paul was mailed an annual report and some sticks of gum.
I nagged at my father to help me invest, but he had never bought a stock in his life. Another paperboy, Sam Abadir, took a bus downtown and found a stockbroker’s office. Sam decided that the trading fees were too high unless you invested at scale, which was also my conclusion. I opened a certificate of deposit at the local bank instead. The year that I turned twelve, my mother wrote a note in her journal describing me as “Amy’s banker and confidant.” Amy knew that if she ran low on cash, her little brother would front her a loan. A few times, my parents asked for the same thing. It made me feel proud; there was often an old-soul quality to us paperboys. I still have a letter that Eric mailed me the summer I went to camp, reassuring me that my folks were staying out of trouble. He wrote, “Your parents are doing a great job on your paper route. I see them every morning.”
I knew that customer relations were my best chance to win Carrier of the Year. Each December, I made holiday cards by hand and delivered them with the newspaper; usually, this generated the equivalent of two months’ pay in tips. Once, I tried the same thing at Easter, but the response rate was low. (It never occurred to me that some subscribers might not celebrate Easter, perhaps because my mother had yet to research her thesis.) On snowy days, I went to subscribers’ homes and offered to shovel their driveways for a fee. After Mr. Wood invited me to join his group of boys at the M.U. football stadium, I worked every home-game Saturday. I walked up and down the stands with a tray of sodas; each time I refilled the tray, I was given a dollar. Most of the other carriers I knew did the same thing for different organizations; Eric and Paul sold drinks with a group that was organized by the local Little League. All of us kept an eye out for drunks, who tipped better. Alcohol was banned at the stadium, but the Missourian ran stories about smuggling techniques. Some fans injected vodka into oranges with hypodermic needles.
Once, my school assigned me to interview somebody in city government. I asked Mr. Wood, who invited me to stop by his home in the evening. Years later, my father said that some instinct told him to accompany me. We sat in the Woods’ living room while I conducted the interview. But my father’s instinct didn’t approach the point of suspicion. Mr. Wood was among the most popular figures in local government, and people admired the volunteer projects that he organized with teen-age boys. These projects were covered periodically in the Missourian. (December 18, 1981: “YOUTHS SHOVEL SNOW TO SERVE.”)
Columbia was two hours by car from St. Louis and Kansas City, the nearest cities of any size. The town was remote, but the presence of the university meant that its provincialism was that of a self-contained world. The Missourian localized big events: in 1981, two days after President Reagan was shot, the paper featured a Columbia high-school grad who, as a Secret Service agent, had helped subdue John Hinckley, Jr. If something happened overseas, reporters sought out international students at M.U. who might be willing to comment. In January, 1980, the paper explained why foreign news mattered:
The pedagogical tone reflected the fact that the Missourian was a teaching newspaper, staffed and published by M.U.’s School of Journalism. No other journalism school in the country produced a daily community paper, and many famous media figures had started out as Missourian reporters, including Seymour Topping, who was the managing editor of the Times in the late seventies and early eighties.
The Daily Tribune also had an excellent reputation, in part because it hired reporters and editors who had been trained at the Missourian. People sometimes said that Columbia had more journalists per capita than anywhere else in America. Periodically, the Missourian’s editorial page acknowledged the town’s support:
Over time, I became a more sophisticated reader of the paper. I especially liked quotations, the way a voice came to life in a story. A sixth-grade English teacher was the first person to tell me that I should think about writing as a career. But it never crossed my mind that someday I might work at the Missourian or become a journalist. I assumed, in a vague way, that I would grow up to be a professor like my father. Between the stories that my father told and the stories that appeared in the paper, my view of university life was impossibly colorful. The Missourian had some gifted writers, and they had a nose for the best campus stories. In 1982, when a Playboy photographer rented a cheap suite at the Holiday Inn East to scout prospects for the magazine’s “Girls of the Big Eight” issue, five hundred women showed up, including a Missourian reporter. She coolly documented the scene’s details—a Polaroid camera, three cases of Rock and Roll Beer—along with the photographer’s casual misogyny. (“Many of the girls who come in are a little on the heavy side. And they think we can do miracles with them.”)
One year, after a sophomore decided to use a shotgun as a prop for an anti-suicide speech in class, the story made page 1, with a classic lede:
The writer described a classmate diving beneath a desk, screaming, “Don’t do it!” I liked stories with action, and I would read anything about fraternities or sororities. My father griped constantly about Greek life, a nemesis of M.U. professors since at least the days of Veblen. (According to the biography, Veblen once told a student, “I don’t say that I will fail any member of a sorority or fraternity, but no member of such an organization has ever yet passed one of my courses.”) The Missourian covered so many frat fires that it almost qualified as a regular beat; the houses tended to ignite because of carelessness and poorly managed kitchens. Occasionally, the newspaper documented the quantity of beer consumed at a party with the same precision that it used to report the G.D.P. On September 11, 1982, a ninety-one-keg party at Phi Kappa Theta merited a page-7 headline (“FRATERNITY BASH IRKS UNIVERSITY”), along with a golly-gee quote from the fraternity’s president: “We threw the party with good intent. Our purpose was not to get the campus drunk. We had no idea it would get so big.”
I delivered to two fraternities. The sketchiest part of my route ran near campus, where residential neighborhoods gave way to some frat buildings and low-rent student housing. That was where I finally came across a body. Early one morning, I was climbing the interior stairway of a decrepit apartment building when I looked up and saw two motionless feet. The shoe soles faced me, heels touching, forming the shape of a V. For what seemed like a very long while, I didn’t move. Then, gathering my courage, I continued climbing. Step by step, the rest of the body came into view: legs, torso, head. He was a fully dressed man with a beard and greasy hair, flat on his back on a landing. I stopped, heart pounding. Then I knelt, listened closely, took a whiff, and made my diagnosis: drunk.
The largest fraternity I delivered to was Sigma Alpha Epsilon. It was housed in an impressive white building in the neoclassical-revival style, with six Ionic columns. I always approached the house from the back, following one of my secret pathways through a neighboring yard. On dark Sunday mornings, after Missouri Tigers game days, crossing the fraternity’s lawn was like entering an artillery field’s zone of fire. Various objects had been tossed from the two-level porch and lay scattered across the grass. There might be articles of clothing, both male and female. Once, I found a billiard ball, which I pocketed. The most common spent projectiles on the S.A.E. lawn were beer cans and bottles. After Columbia implemented a five-cent deposit law, I would collect as many empties as would fit inside my canvas sack.
Each spring, the S.A.E. members dug a grave in their lawn. The first year I saw this, it scared the living hell out of me. Walking across the grass, I stumbled upon a long pit and a wooden coffin, its shape shadowy in the predawn light. The second year, I was less surprised, and after that the annual appearance of a coffin and an open grave became a normal sign of springtime. As a boy, I never knew the purpose of this strange ritual. It wasn’t covered in the Missourian, and I must not have mentioned it to my parents, who had no memory of it years later. That was also typical of childhood, when many strange and unsettling things were accepted without explanation.
Recently, I tracked down some S.A.E. members from that era. They explained that the coffin was connected to a fictional figure called Paddy Murphy. Different chapters had their own versions, but the M.U. Paddy Murphy was somebody who had died from alcohol poisoning. Each year, a different brother played Paddy, lying in the coffin, where he was roasted by a series of mock eulogies. The coffin had been acquired by a brother with a summer job in a mortuary in St. Louis. He had driven the two hours to Columbia on Interstate 70 with the coffin sitting upright in the passenger seat of an open convertible.
On April 24, 1981, the Missourian ran an unsigned comment at the top of the Opinion page:
By then, I was nearly twelve, and strong enough that I had started using a bicycle on my route. One thing I liked about biking was that I could greet Mr. Wood but not stop. Even before the bicycle, I had made it clear that I didn’t want him touching me anymore. There was never a confrontation, but I found ways to keep my distance. When he asked if I wanted to participate in his youth group at the Odd Fellows Lodge, I told him that I was too busy.
I had read enough stories in the paper to know that Mr. Wood’s behavior was wrong. But I still had some confusion, because he was so admired in the community. The Missourian editorial noted that Mr. Wood had been a Scoutmaster and a Sunday-school teacher, and it mentioned his plans:
During the years that I delivered it, the Missourian remained the same size, averaging about thirty pages a day, and the circulation was stable. I had no idea that newspapers or carriers might have an uncertain future. But recently, while rereading issues from those years, I recognized signs of trouble. A 1983 feature about a spate of mergers noted that Columbia had become the third-smallest American city that still had competing dailies. In 1981, the Sunday edition ran a feature—“MAKE ROOM FOR DATA”—about the first wave of home computers. The writer referred to something called the Source, which could transmit information between machines:
As a boy, I was oblivious to such predictions, and I also didn’t realize that the Missourian was struggling to find carriers. Periodically, a story appeared about somebody getting attacked on the job. In 1980, an adult woman carrier was robbed and sexually assaulted on her Missourian route; a couple of years later, a fourteen-year-old newspaper vender was held up at knifepoint. The paper sometimes celebrated carriers with descriptions of the job, which didn’t sound particularly appealing:
I was bitten by dogs repeatedly, with the worst offender being a cairn terrier on South Garth. The animal was tiny but vicious, and he often left my ankles bleeding. My father called the animal-control office, which was notoriously unreliable; in this case, someone there talked to the owner a couple of times and then gave up. She was in her thirties, a distracted woman living alone in a run-down rental. Somebody suggested doggy treats, but the animal ignored them and made a beeline for my leg. After that, my father consulted with our mailman, who went to his truck and returned with a large cannister of mace. The cannister featured an image of an angry mutt with saliva dripping from its jaws.
My father accompanied me the first morning I tried the spray. I always believed that, in comparison with him, I was growing up weak and soft. He told exotic stories about his childhood, in a working-class part of Los Angeles where fights had been common. As a boy, he had tattooed his left hand with a pachuco mark, a cross-shaped symbol near the thumb that was popular with the Chicano gangsters in his neighborhood. My father had dark skin, and by his forties the mark was hard to make out. But in his teen-age years it had been distinct enough to get noticed, unhappily, by his future father-in-law the first time they met.
My father told me to hold my ground when the dog charged. The terrier came up snarling, and I hit him in the face with a long, heavy stream. He collapsed against the trunk of a tree, where I sprayed him again. His breathing became increasingly labored. “I think he might die,” my father said. But then, like some demented jack-in-the-box, the terrier popped up and charged again. In the course of the following days, he seemed to develop an immunity to the spray.
Every generation romanticizes the struggles of its youth. Like many people my age, I complain about helicopter parents, and I speak fondly of long unsupervised days during childhood. But I’m also under no illusions about the ways in which that world was a hard place. It’s obvious in the papers that I once delivered, which feature many stories about terrible accidents involving children—drowning in icy ponds or getting electrocuted after climbing utility poles.
There was also a lot of victim-blaming. In 1979, a woman wrote to “Dear Abby” complaining about getting rejected from jobs she applied to because she was overweight. “Face it, most fat women are not as attractive as their slim sisters,” Abby counselled. “So, do yourself a favor and quit asking for ‘kindness’ from others. See your doctor about a diet.” Two other advice seekers worked at a clothing store where their male boss had drilled holes so that he could peer into the dressing room. “A confrontation is not necessary,” Abby responded. “Every morning check the dressing room wall for holes, then cover them with adhesive paper. Do this routinely and your boss will soon realize that you are onto his dirty little peeping game.” This approach seemed common when authorities were uninterested or incompetent. If you have a problem, fix it yourself.
After the dog mace failed, I borrowed my friend Joe Kopine’s Crosman BB pistol. Joe had purchased the gun because of its powerful air-cartridge system. It looked like a real weapon, with heavy black metal; a bright-orange tip would have seemed absurd to a boy of that era. I packed the pistol with the newspapers in my canvas bag. The next time the dog appeared, I drew the gun, held steady with both hands, and pulled the trigger. The dog leaped straight into the air, spinning and yelping. In the following week, I shot him another five or six times. And that was all it took; he never attacked again.
On the afternoon of May 4, 1982, my father told me that there was something we needed to talk about. He didn’t want to do it at home, and he looked upset. We set off together, on foot, in the direction of campus.
He was uncharacteristically quiet. I was nearly thirteen, and I had mostly figured out how to get along in school. The longer we walked, the more I sensed that my father was upset by something other than a teacher’s bad report.
He found a bench in the university’s Peace Park. It was a beautiful afternoon, and students were outside enjoying the sunshine. After we sat down, he said, “I wanted to tell you that Mr. Wood was arrested. It’s in the Tribune today. It will be in the Missourian tomorrow.”
Initially, I didn’t know what to say. Then I asked why Mr. Wood had been arrested.
“He was caught with a teen-age boy on a bus,” my father said. “He was arrested for sodomy.” There was a pause. “Do you know what that means?”
I nodded slowly. Sodomy appeared periodically in articles about arrests, although it confused me—the word seemed to describe different things. The part in the Bible about Sodom also lacked key details. But I wasn’t going to ask those questions now.
“I know that Mr. Wood often talked to you on the paper route,” my father said. “We need to know if he did anything to you. If he touched you or did anything inappropriate.”
Now I understood why his mood hadn’t been recognizable. For the first time, I saw true fear in my father’s eyes. I thought for a moment before answering.
“No,” I said. “Nothing happened. He didn’t do anything to me.”
“Are you sure?” my father said. “It’s important that we know. If he did anything, the police need to talk to you.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
His face relaxed, and he said that he was glad that he had accompanied me when I went to the Woods’ home for my school project. “Who knows what he was planning,” my father said. “The story in the paper said that he has been molesting boys for years.”
I asked what would happen to Mr. Wood.
“He’ll go to prison,” my father said. “They do terrible things to child molesters in prison.”
I asked if he was already there.
“No. They have to have a trial. He’ll be at home until then. You haven’t been seeing him outside in the mornings recently, have you?”
“No.”
“Good,” he said. “Make sure you don’t have any contact with him.”
Walking home that sunny afternoon, I sensed my father’s relief, and I felt as though I had protected him from something awful. But already I was wondering what I would do if I saw Mr. Wood again.
The following morning, the stack of newspapers was waiting at the end of the driveway. I carried them inside and read the front page:
There was a photograph of Mr. Wood from before his arrest. The story said that he had taken a job in retirement as a school-bus driver, and one day a parent became suspicious.
I folded all the papers and went outside. The closer I got to 110 South Garth Avenue, the more nervous I felt. But the lights were off at the house. I threw the paper onto the porch and continued down the silent street.
Throughout summer and fall, reports about Mr. Wood’s case appeared in the Missourian and the Tribune. My parents didn’t discuss these articles with me or my sisters, and I was careful to read them only when I was alone.
On June 21, 1982, in a federal court in Washington, D.C., John Hinckley, Jr., was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The following morning, that story appeared on the Missourian’s front page, and a headline on page 7 read “MENTAL EXAM OK’D FOR WOOD.” Wood’s lawyer seemed to be attempting the strategy that had worked for Hinckley, entering a plea of not guilty on account of “mental disease or defect.” At the time of the arrest, Wood had admitted to Detective Dale Richardson that he had abused boys repeatedly since 1938, and that pedophilia “was something he couldn’t control.” One Missourian article quoted the officer:
The detective seemed to downplay the crimes. A story in the Tribune noted:
There were many references to Wood paying his victims and buying them gifts. The boys were not named, but I believed that some of them had sold drinks alongside me at M.U. games. With each story, I felt a rush of guilt. I had no word for what I had experienced—in those days, grooming was something that happened to dogs and horses. All I knew was that my mother and Matthew had been right. Greed was weakness, and Mr. Wood had exploited it; he had given me quarters because I had wanted them desperately. I believed that I was partly at fault for what had happened.
I also knew that I should have told my father the truth. But the stories in the paper convinced me that I had done the right thing. I didn’t want to talk to those police; I didn’t want to stand in that courtroom; I didn’t want to appear in these articles:
Wood’s lawyer asked the judge to dismiss the charges because the youths were “accomplices in the very crime.” This motion was considered but then denied. Eventually, a number of the charges were dropped, as part of a plea bargain, and Wood’s lawyer pushed for no jail time. Wood had been evaluated by a psychiatrist who had been a professor at the university’s medical school, and the psychiatrist testified that Wood should not pose a threat to the community. “Taking into account human error, the chances are there should be no repetition of this behavior,” he said. He also told the court that young boys who engage in voluntary homosexual acts with adults usually recover, and that such contacts are often “loving, caring, positive relationships.”
A number of prominent citizens appeared as character witnesses. H. Clyde Wilson, Jr., a former mayor, testified about Wood’s contributions to city government, and he said that no “useful purpose” would be served if he were incarcerated. The Missourian described the defense lawyer’s closing statement:
From the day I learned of the arrest, I sensed that Mr. Wood would find a way to see me again. In the end, it happened under cover of a heavy storm. On rainy mornings, I couldn’t ride my bike, and neighbors were much less likely to be outside.
That day, I placed the paper onto his porch, and suddenly he was behind me; I hadn’t seen him in the downpour. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m not supposed to see you!” I said, but my voice sounded childlike in the storm. I saw that he was weeping, and suddenly my body went limp and I began to sob. He wrapped his arms around me, repeating those two words over and over. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The interaction probably lasted less than a minute, but it felt like forever. Finally, I pulled away and ran.
At the end of the street, I huddled beneath a tree until my breathing was under control. When I returned home, I made sure that my face betrayed nothing.
On the morning of September 28, 1982, before folding the papers, I found the headline, on page 8:
The article quoted the circuit judge Frank Conley. “I don’t think there is a case that has cost me more personal anguish as a judge than this case,” he told the defendant. “I’ve seen a lot of the good that you have done.” He continued, “But so much of the good has been ruined by that which is bad.” He referred to the psychiatrist’s characterization of Wood’s contact with the boys. “This court is not of the opinion that this was a loving, caring relationship,” he said. “It was a very vile relationship.” The judge issued a sentence of ten years in prison, for five counts of sodomy.
Judge Conley’s mother lived on my route, and I threw the paper onto her porch. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel nervous on South Garth. At 110, the house was dark, the way it had been every morning since the arrest.
Beginning that fall, a number of terrible stories about boys appeared in the paper. In southern Missouri, a woman and her boyfriend were arrested after locking her seven-year-old son in the basement for three months. When authorities found the boy, he weighed thirty-two pounds. The Missourian quoted the woman’s explanation for her boyfriend’s treatment of the child. “He didn’t like him,” she said. “He didn’t want him to come out of the basement.” Another local court case involved two adult Boy Scout troop leaders who, during a camp-out, branded their Scouts on the buttocks with a red-hot coat hanger that had been shaped like male genitals. A college student in Columbia was arrested and sentenced to prison after shooting his former foster father in the back of the head. For years, the man had taken in multiple foster children, always boys, and he repeatedly paddled them, took nude photographs, and administered enemas, which he tape recorded so that he could replay the children’s moans. The college student had complained to a family-services agency and received no response, so he used a .22-calibre pistol that had been borrowed from a neighbor. If you have a problem, fix it yourself. After he was sentenced to five years, the young man told the Missourian, “I always figured I’d spend some time.”
These stories prompted anguished letters and editorials. Citizens wondered if something was wrong with society, and they debated whether Glenn Wood had deserved to go to jail. The husband of one of Wood’s daughters wrote to the Tribune:
Richardson, who had helped conduct the initial investigation, published a response. In earlier stories, the detective had seemed to minimize the impact of Wood’s crimes. But now he set the record straight:
Recently, when reviewing these articles, I recognized many phrases and details, because I had read them so obsessively as a thirteen-year-old. Another Missourian story appeared on September 8, 1982, under the headline “IOWA NEWSBOY VANISHES; SEARCH PARTY STUMPED.” A paperboy named John Gosch, who was my age, had disappeared on a Sunday morning. Gosch became one of the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons.
He also became one of the reasons that children stopped working as carriers. Last year, I met with Bruce Moore, who had started working at the Missourian in 1982, eventually becoming circulation manager. “You were one of the last kids to deliver the newspaper by bike,” Moore told me. “It happened not because the Missourian didn’t want to hire kids. It was because society dictated it was unsafe for kids to be delivering at that time in the dark.”
Nearly forty-four years after Gosch disappeared, his case remains unsolved. When I read the old Missourian story, one detail echoed in my memory. On the morning the boy vanished, his parents found the wagon that he used to haul the heavy Sunday edition of the Des Moines Register. Gosch’s mother was quoted: “Every single paper was in his wagon.”
I never won Carrier of the Year. By the final stage of my career, I knew that it wouldn’t happen, because I had recognized patterns. Children tended to win early—that was why I was named Carrier of the Month when I was only ten. My analysis was that the Missourian wanted to encourage younger carriers, and by the time they got older they were probably on the way out, so it wasn’t worth wasting awards on them. This was a good life lesson, one that would have made sense to Thorstein Veblen: the longer you work for a company, the less you are valued.
My last day on the job turned out to be Wednesday, August 22, 1984. On that morning, the top headline read “GOP CONVENTION PASSES BATTLE PLAN: FORD UNLEASHES ON MONDALE.” The paper was sixty-two pages, with a price of twenty-five cents, and it weighed 15.4 ounces. The size was significant because, while carrying an unusually heavy bag and taking a tight turn on my bike in a parking lot, I skidded out and fractured my left tibia. I lay in the parking lot shouting until somebody called an ambulance.
Before the accident, I had already been thinking about quitting. On the next International Newspaper Carrier Day, when the Missourian announced its Carrier of the Year, it also ran a small notice:
Two other mornings from that final period remain vivid in my mind. One was when the S.A.E. house caught fire. On a bitterly cold January morning in 1984, I approached the house through the back lawn and saw that the porch had burned and been gutted. Firefighters had recently left; water from their hoses had frozen into beautiful icy tendrils that ran along the pillared porch.
The other morning was at some point after Glenn Wood went to prison. I never saw him again, but once, while delivering the papers, I encountered his wife on the sidewalk. She was walking the dog, and I said hello.
The woman said nothing. Our eyes met, and I saw that her face was full of cold fury. A wave of guilt and shame washed over me, and I hurried past. Along with the last time I saw her husband, that encounter remains one of my most awful memories from childhood.
After turning sixteen, I used my paperboy savings to buy a 1974 Dodge Dart. The car was Mississippi brown and as long as a city block; in high school, I loved its absolute uncoolness. The fact that my parents never saved a cent paid off when I was admitted to Princeton University. I qualified for Pell grants and large amounts of financial aid, and I entered the university determined to become a writer. For the first three semesters, I applied to the introductory course in creative writing, submitting short stories, but each time I was rejected. I felt hopelessly provincial: nothing important or interesting had ever happened to me. I never considered writing about Mr. Wood, because the memory was too painful.
My parents still live in the house where I grew up. They must be among a minuscule number of octogenarians in this country who subscribe to two daily papers in print. Columbia is now the second-smallest community in America with separately owned competing newspapers. The Tribune, like many papers, has suffered after corporate buyouts and staff reductions. But the Missourian thrives, because it is subsidized by the university. Last year, I met with Elizabeth Conner Stephens, the executive editor, in the paper’s spacious offices, at the edge of campus. It felt like a vibrant, old-fashioned newsroom; even in summer, fifty student reporters were busy on staff. “The reason it works for us is we’ve been doing it since 1908,” Stephens said. “It’s been baked into our curriculum.”
Recently, when I talked with other former carriers, they all mentioned how the job had shaped their adult selves. At the age of twenty-four, Eric Neuner founded NuShoe, which eventually grew to become one of the largest shoe-repair companies in the world. Eric believed that his paperboy obsession with efficiency was one reason he had been good at organizing factories in San Diego and Mexico. He often meets other C.E.O.s from our generation who delivered newspapers as children. Eric also remarked that such a job is impossible to imagine today. “I wouldn’t let my kids go out at five in the morning,” he said.
Like Eric and many other former carriers, I have never been able to sleep late. To this day, I am uncomfortable around dogs. I am good with money. I fulfilled my parents’ dreams by joining the Peace Corps, but after returning and writing a book about the experience I took the first advance check, called a college friend at Credit Suisse, and started learning how to invest. I know the verse: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a freelance writer to survive if he can’t manage his finances. I retain an appetite for silence and solitude, and I can keep a secret. I never told a soul about Mr. Wood until I was thirty years old. I still feel an occasional twinge of guilt, because my life and my marriage have gone well, and I suspect that this might not be true for others who were harmed. For more than four decades, I have saved one of the Missourians I was carrying when I broke my leg. Now the pages are yellowed; the rubber band rotted away years ago. I placed the newspaper on my desk when I began to write this story. ♦