Breaking News and a Breaking Back

Sundays were supposed to be a day of rest; God himself did it, I thought we were supposed to as well.

Not me.

When I was fourteen, Sundays started with the smell of ink, the creak of my bike chain, and thirty-five copies of the Ogdensburg Advance News trying to rip my shoulder out of its socket.

No, it wasn’t church at Notre Dame that ruined Sundays - that was a breeze - it was dragging myself out of bed at the crack of dawn, pedaling down to The Journal building, and loading those thirty-five papers into a big white canvas sling sack I either wore like a sash or rigged to my handlebars with baling twine and teenage optimism.

Heavy? Heavier than the smoke at the Catholic bingo games at Madill school - and I should know; my Grandmother used to take me along. By the time summer was over, I need a respiratory therapist.

Stuffed with ads, coupons, Parade magazine (my personal favorite), comics, engagement announcements, death notices, and, somewhere in there, the news.

Trying to tri-fold the Sunday edition into a throwable baton, like we did with the weekday paper, was impossible—akin to folding a phone book for Australia.

And every kid tried to do it - once. You’d get a running start on your bike - whose tires look flat under all the weight -, fling it at the porch, and instead of landing gracefully like a little butterfly, would explode like a paper firework midair—coupons fluttering into hedges, comics doing barrel rolls down the sidewalk, half of it landing in something…wet. I’m pretty sure the New York State environmental impact report wasn’t closed for another three years.

Even if you did somehow keep it intact—maybe by wrapping it in chicken wire—you risked destroying a screen door, maiming a dog, or denting a Ford. So no, you couldn’t throw it. You had to walk it up, place it gently where the customer wanted it—mailbox, porch, side door, or wherever instructed; I swear, some of those people would have you deliver it to there bed.

God help you if it rained; not only would you get soaked, but the paper would somehow get wet, despite being in a plastic sleeve. It was inevitable.

Once a week, you’d go door to door collecting payment—about a buck-fifty, as I recall. You had to tear off a little stub to give the customer as a receipt - when they did pay. Plenty didn’t. And when they did, some would toss you a quarter as a tip and act like they’d named you in their will.

There was one kid who had the Riverview Towers route. Oh, it was a route, in the academic sense, but cakewalk would have been a more accurate term.  He walked indoors, warm and dry, dropping papers in front of apartment doors and riding the elevator up and down at his leisure.  Took him maybe an hour. People tried to buy that kid’s route. Rumor was, parents got involved. There may even have been lawyers.

Yes, the delivery part was a grind.

But The Journal? That paper was something else. It had been around since 1822, and it had everything.

As a kid, my first stop was always the comics page- though I never quite knew when to jump into those one-panel odysseys like Prince Valiant, because you didn’t know the backstory; It was like the spinning wheel of death at the playground with the metal handles. You never knew when to jump on that either. Kids would spin that thing so fast, you could neither get on, nor get off.

Of course, the comics were not only good for just plain old reading, but for trying the old Silly Putty trick of lifting off ink, and mashing the resulting character’s face into distortions only seen in exorcisms..

I mean, it had it all - comics, a crossword, police blotter, want ads, legal notices, who was married, who was engaged, sports, Kelly’s Comments, At Your Leisure, Parade, obtiuaries, weather report, School Menus, TV schedule, Letters to the Editor, ads like crazy, and oh yeah, news.

The classifieds were pure small-town poetry—“Slightly used wedding dress, never worn.” People selling the weirdest things - “Warped Tupperware lids, box of ten, $1”. I mean, what are you going to do with warped Tupperware lids for $1? I would only pay 50¢.

Sports covered everything from National League scores to which bowling team dethroned Buster’s.

The school menus were published so you could decide whether to bring your lunch or buy it - either way could be dicey.  When they were serving hot dogs, they never just said hot dog. No, it was the more continental Frankfurter on a roll. I mean, did they come any other way? Was the bun necessary to keep the hot dog from rolling off the plastic tray? And if that was the case, wouldn’t it be ironic that the bread was named “roll”? And lunches always came with milk—always—like wet came with rain.

The obituaries were written with such flowery detail, you half expected the dearly departed to sit up and thank you for reading. They listed what the decedent enjoyed - being with her grandkids, Sunday meals, and volunteering at church. Now I’ve planned ahead with my obit, and it’s going to go something like “Could never figure out why cereal bags shredded when you opened them, why pennies still existed and what Oswegatchie actually meant. Otherwise, like to eat.” Something like that.

Then came the Notes of Thanks and Prayers to God—long, heartfelt messages signed by people like “The Johnson Family” or just “A Grateful Reader.” I didn’t realize that God read the Sunday paper, and OUR sunday paper, no less.

The Letters to the Editor section came in two flavors: people furious about the mayor, and people furious about the people furious about the mayor. Chuck Kelly had his own forum with “Kelly’s Comments” talking about everything - local politics, supporting the Seaway Festival, or such.

The Local Calendar told you what was happening all over the area—bean suppers in Heuvelton, bake sales in Lisbon, choir concerts in Gouverneur—but somehow poor DeKalb Junction never made the cut; nothing happened there, not even grass growing, apparently.

TV listings were a roadmap to the week’s entertainment, always including at least one movie that had aired every month since 1964. You had to decipher which colored number box was your channel, which I mastered about as well as calculus. The channel I watched the most was probably the cable channel with all the weather gauge dials - temperature, barometric pressure, rainfall - as the camera slowly panned back and forth, back and forth, endlessly.

And best of all, you could see what was playing at The Strand—a single-screen theater with sticky floors and a velvet curtain that hadn’t moved since Eisenhower. Later came Cinemas 1 & 2, which, as stupid boys, we thought were clever little clues to the bathroom reference of one and two.

The store ads? There were enough to wallpaper half of St. Lawrence County. Loblaws, Grants, Ames, Great American, all the big places had something for sale, and the Advance News was the place to get the word out on saving 5¢ on a can of tuna this week.

No wonder the thing weighed thirty pounds.

What I always wondered was how the heck they managed to fit it all so neatly onto the page. It was basically a puzzle—ads here, headlines there, a prayer for Aunt Millie under a coupon for Meow Mix.  Some poor soul down at the Journal had to cut and paste—literally—until it all fit, I guessed. One typo and the obits might bleed into the TV listings, and suddenly Aunt Millie was guest-starring on The Love Boat.

While I was researching this story, I came across a gem in the At Your Leisure section—a callout asking readers to submit local nicknames. And wow, did they deliver. Some of the names sounded like vaudeville acts, old-time wrestlers, or backup singers for Roy Orbison, but I swear, this is not made up: Chee Chee Pacquette, Hawkshaw Hackett, Skin Skin Deloney, Toots Tooley, Old Ma Duck, and Putty Julius.

Then there was Battling Jack Fournier, who sounds like he entered rooms by punching the door off its hinges.

Moon Shaver had to be involved in something either magical or illegal.

Pic Dessert and Mush Melleon? They were either cousins or a novelty act at the Harvest Festival.

And when you were done with the Journal—well, you weren’t.

It could wrap fish, line birdcages, pad packages, clean windows, wrap dishes when moving, serve as a drop cloth, or house-train a dog. Try doing all that with a website.

And to think—I hauled thirty pounds of that multipurpose miracle around town every Sunday for four dollars and fifty cents…

And considered myself rich.