Special Delivery

MARTHA

When I was a little kid, I always loved the newspaper. We would get the Inquirer everyday, and even when I was little, I always read the comics. And then as I got older, I got really into the sports section. There was something about it arriving every day, and having to wait for the write-up until the morning after the game. I just loved it.

My name is Martha Cooney, I am a native Philadelphian, so this project is exciting to me. I’m a writer and comedian and storyteller, both on the page and on the stage.

When I was 10 and my brother was 12, my brother became a paperboy, and I was so jealous of that.

He delivered the Philadelphia Daily News. And that was awesome, getting another paper in our house.

MARTHA: Oh omg I was actually going through the pile trying to find this so I’m really glad I found it.

This was around 1993 when the Phillies were in the World Series. I would read about them religiously. And the thing about the Daily News that was special was that they had these back covers with some amazing sports headlines with a pun or a funny image.

MARTHA: It says Woomp there it is, Philadelphia Daily News Game 6 memories

Like — if you lived in Philly at the time, you must remember this — there was a cover of that song “Woomp, There It Is”, by Tag Team, where they changed the lyrics to be about the Phillies. It was always playing on Q102.

MARTHA: Like the Braves will take a hike when they see Jim Eisenreich. So anyway this is a pullout poster from the Daily News that definitely came from my brother’s delivery pile.

With my brother being a paperboy, we would get all these extra copies of the paper and so I’d save those back covers and put them up all over my walls.

I really wanted to deliver papers too, but I was a little too young for it. My brother let me help sometimes, but I don’t think he paid me… I should take that up with him.

I was jealous that he was earning money and had a job. We were always hustling as kids in the neighborhood. Like this was a time where our parents would send us out to play in the streets, just come in at dinner time, and we’d just be roaming around on our bikes scheming ways to make money. Selling lemonade, or having a toy sale or scooping snow and putting food coloring in it and trying to sell water ice out on the corner. You never made any money doing any of those things. But at 12, my brother had a real job making real money. And not only that, delivering something I thought was really cool and valuable and a community good. And I just really wanted that to happen for me.

But… I never ended up delivering the paper. I did end up writing for my high school paper, and I kept reading the paper,

And then, a few years after college, I was figuring out what I wanted to do next. I moved back in with my parents in Northeast Philadelphia. I was 28 and looking for work.

Now this is around 2011, the era of Craigslist. So I went on the job boards and I was very into, like, this is the way for me to live this artist’s life. I’ll pick various gigs and not have one thing that takes up all my time. I tutored somebody for the GRE. Babysitting, lots of babysitting, catered some random events, a little bit of house cleaning… I applied to be someone’s personal chef. Nothing was off the table.

And then I came across a listing that seemed perfect for me.

Not quite newspaper delivery… but close. They were looking for people to deliver phone books door to door. Perfect! I thought. I’ll get to drive around, on my own, be my own boss, this entrepreneurial fantasy where I’m listening to my music and bringing people this really important community resource… where they can find the number for the local pizza place, or their kid’s friend’s mom to schedule a play date. I thought, I’d be doing a community job! I am delivering this useful medium of information. Like, you’re welcome!

How hard could it be?

THEME MUSIC IN

JAMIE: From WHYY, You’re listening to Philadelphia Revealed

I’m your host, Jamie J, executive director of First Person Arts, a nonprofit organization that believes everyone has a story to tell.

Across 10 episodes you’re going to get a tour of the Atwater Kent collection, sometimes called Philadelphia’s attic.

It’s a collection that’s grown over the decades, acquiring Philly’s material culture from individuals, families, and institutions. Sometimes literally from the trash.

In every episode of this podcast, you’ll learn about an object in the Atwater Kent collection and hear a story inspired by it from a First Person Arts storyteller. We think every Philadelphian will be able to see themselves in this collection, and that learning about Philadelphia’s many histories can help us understand its present — and future.

THEME MUSIC OUT

This is Episode Eight: Special Delivery

With storyteller Martha Cooney. Martha is a native Philadelphian. She has published a humor essay collection and hosts the variety comedy show Yo Live.

And she was inspired by a wagon from 1940, once used to deliver the long-running evening newspaper — the Philadelphia Bulletin.

MARTHA:

It’s like an old, like wooden wagon, it has looks like metal wheels that are painted red, , and it actually has the evening bulletin printed on the sides, the lettering of the newspaper.

And you can see the wear on it. like this object has definitely been used.

I’m interested in what the actual delivery route was like. Like, did they walk along the street and toss them? Or did people walk up and buy them off the cart?

And I’m curious how much they got paid, how they were treated? And how much power and influence did the newspaper have? So yea I’m interested in what the labor conditions and the working life was like for those people

MUSIC

ELMER: Delivery was one of the problems that led to the demise of the Bulletin because to deliver in the afternoon during traffic // and in an eight county region in three states. // To get the paper out like that was a logistics problem.

Elmer Smith is a veteran journalist. He worked at the Philadelphia Bulletin from 1973 to 1982, when the paper ended its long run

ELMER: The bulletin closed in January of 1982 // And I closed the door behind me. There was nobody left.

The paper that became the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin was founded in 1847. It ran, sometimes changing names and ownership, for 135 years. For 76 of them, it was the largest newspaper in the city. And once, the largest evening newspaper in the country. Its iconic slogan: “Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin.”

In the first half of the 20th century, newspapers were thriving. There were morning papers, afternoon papers, evening papers…

ELMER: We were AMs and PMs. // The Bulletin was a PM. // The inquirer was an AM, which means essentially that comes out the night before.

There was a time, this is going to sound crazy, there was a time when you could presumably buy a different paper every hour // throughout the night in Philadelphia, in any major city.

Elmer was hired at the Bulletin in 1973, as a “rewrite man.”

ELMER: There was a difference between writers and reporters. They had different pay scales, covered by the same union, but I was hired as a writer.
What happened on, in those days is that you had reporters on the street. // and in the evenings, they would get a story // a traffic accident, a fire or something, and they would call it in to a rewrite desk. The guy on the rewrite desk would write their story for them. We never put our names on, on their stories.

Working nights, Elmer only got a glimpse of the newsroom at first. But one day, he came in and saw it in full swing.

ELMER SMITH: It was incredible. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. // There must have been maybe 120, 130 journalists in this room. There may have been two black people. Out of these 130 people. And I looked at that situation and I thought, you know, why am I here? // And what I’m really thinking is // The reality is that you can’t do this without somebody who looks like me. you’re incomplete without an input like mine. And it’s one of the things that sustained me through some periods that would have led to self doubt.

The Bulletin was a family-owned paper at the time, and Elmer said it FELT like a family.

ELMER: Your newspaper is like your father’s favorite cigar, you know, uh, maybe no better than anybody else’s, but it’s what he preferred. And that’s the way it was with newspapers in those days.

Elmer stayed with the Bulletin and became a reporter, covering the DA’s office, criminal courts and then City Council. He got to know the Bulletin inside and out. Including how the paper was distributed and delivered.

Every day, for every edition, trucks drove around the city to pick up newspapers from the “mailers” – people who stood on the dock and tossed bundles of papers into the backs of trucks. Elmer says a lot of those mailers were teachers: they worked in the classroom during the day, and bundled the Bulletin at night.

The drivers hauled papers to newsstands and “bureaus” all over the city. After school, delivery boys came to pick them up.

ELMER: A newspaper boy was a businessman. He had a book, he had a little clipper attached to his belt. Obviously he knew who his customers were // he had a bill. The paper billed him for the papers and he had to pay his bill before he could bring the papers out. It was business at every level.

The delivery boys folded their papers in thirds at the Bureau, and then delivered by foot or bike. The Atwater Kent collection’s wagon is from the 1940s, but even into the 70s, some newspaper boys used wagons to make their deliveries.

ELMER: They were making a penny a paper, and this is six days a week. So doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it was actually fruitful

But it was not always an easy job. Kids had to resolve disputes with their customers over late papers or missed payments. Sometimes, they got robbed.

And by the late 70s, the newspaper industry was changing — fast. Television news was competing for the same audience — especially evening news.

ELMER: Now the afternoon paper people pick up on the way home from work is not as essential anymore. You could turn on the television and see it. So those changes led to the demise of the Bulletin and afternoon papers all over America.

Suddenly, a newspaper that had to be delivered around the region during rush hour traffic didn’t make a lot of sense. All of this turned up the heat on the intense competition between the Bulletin and the city’s other biggest paper – the Philadelphia Inquirer.

ELMER: The rivalry between the Bulletin and the Inquirer was heated, it was serious, and it was, it was existential. I mean, for us, it was a question of whether we would continue to exist, and we fought it, uh, as well as we could.

When Elmer started working in the newsroom in 1973, the Bulletin was outselling the Inquirer. By 1980, the tides had turned and the Inquirer was outselling the Bulletin.

ELMER: Newspapers in general were dying // It was happening everywhere in the country. The afternoon papers were dying at a really fast clip. The Bulletin actually held on probably longer than most. It changed ownership a couple of times during this, uh, two or three year period when it was in its death throes. But // it was not only all over the country, it was all over the world.

For a time the Bulletin tried to open up suburban bureaus to appeal to where many of their readers now lived — in Delaware, Bucks, and Berks Counties. Elmer took a position in Bucks County for a few years.

But many people moved to the suburbs and took their newspaper subscription with them, switching from the Bulletin or Inquirer to the Bucks County Times or the Reading Eagle.

ELMER: So, local papers in those areas started to pick up, it probably picked up as much of that circulation as anybody, but most of that circulation was lost to newspapers.

When subscribers left, so did advertisers. By the early 80s, the writing was on the wall. The Bulletin was bought by a large conglomerate, whose main business was not newspapers. And it was purchased at a lowball price. Elmer took that as a bad sign.

ELMER: When I looked at the price they paid, I said, these are not newspaper people. These people are not committed to the newspaper business. They’re not in it for the long haul. // When these conglomerates started to take over these failing large newspapers, They took them over to close them. // It was just business and we were not good business.

After the sale, the newsroom got more chaotic — people left for new jobs. Elmer could have left too — his colleagues were being snapped up left and right for jobs at the Inquirer or the Daily news — but Elmer and a few other senior staffers stuck it out at the Bulletin to the very end.

ELMER: it was a dangerous decision because // If you stayed there’s a good chance that you would not get a job. So it was a chance, but I took a chance on the Bulletin because the Bulletin took a chance on me. // They gave me the one thing that any black journalist should ever ask for. And that’s a chance. I made it good. I appreciated them. They underpaid me. And I knew I was underpaid, but I would have stayed until the end of my career at that place because they made it possible for me.

The Bulletin published its last issue on January 18, 1982.

And just days later, Elmer did get a new job — as a sports writer for the Daily News. The same paper and section that so thrilled Martha as a kid.

ELMER: The Daily News had a sort of a maverick culture. It’s like Philadelphia, you know, you’re not New York and you’re not Washington. It’s kind of in the middle. They weren’t the Bulletin and they weren’t the Inquirer. They were never going to sell as many papers

The Daily News thrived not on home delivery, but on sales at newsstands.

ELMER: They sold it with a front page so that you could be walking past and you see something on the front page so garish it should make you stop and buy it. That’s how the daily news, or any point of sale newspaper functions. And so, they had to be outrageous in order to stop you

Elmer worked at the Daily News for 29 years, mostly as a sports columnist, with a focus on boxing.

But more disruptions to the newspaper industry kept coming. By the 2000s, online news was becoming a major competitor. Classifieds moved to Craigslist… Social media upended how people get news. Newspaper ad sales peaked in 2006 and have been falling ever since.

That year, with circulation and ad revenue down, the Daily News became just an edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Without the Bulletin, Philadelphia has fewer newspapers than it once did. That means fewer jobs for journalists… and delivery people..

MARTHA: When I think about this wagon and the time when it’s from, I imagine that back then there was a respect for the news, a respect for journalists, and a respect for journalism overall, whereas now it doesn’t seem the same. There’s a lack of trust that people don’t always know who to trust because there’s so much false information out there.

And I feel like back then there was just a value to it. That this was an honorable and really important thing. // like the fact that the paper was physical. And went from hand to hand, to truck, to kid, to bike, to doorstep, just it feels almost more reliable or trustworthy

Like, yeah, I know where this is coming from.

Being a trusted source of information… that’s sort of what Martha thought she was doing when she started delivering phonebooks.

MUSIC

Ok so to set the scene: It’s summer, 2010, I’m 28. The iPhone has just recently been introduced, but not everyone has one yet. Online news is just about to become more popular than print newspapers. And I have literally just gotten my driver’s license.

I never learned to drive growing up in Philly, so when I moved back my dad taught me to drive in the Toys R Us / Kmart parking lot.

So I got my license, thinking great this will help me get gigs. And boom, I see this listing for a phone book delivery driver. Great. Sign me up.

The phone book had been a staple of my 90s childhood — my parents opening it up to order a pizza, or find a plumber. Or so many other things — to press something flat, to stand on when you can’t quite reach, to use as a doorstop or a riser for a kid who is too small to reach the table from their chair. And so yea, in my mind it was still a household staple.

MUSIC FADE OUT HERE

I had to go to an orientation at a warehouse on State Road. We sat in these folding chairs and this woman, Carol, walked us through it. Carol was very no nonsense, it was a don’t mess this up type of situation.

She explained we were delivering yellow pages style books — big fat books of phone numbers and ads for local businesses and services. Carol showed us a DVD on good customer service. She told us we’d need to wear a tracker around our necks to make sure that we physically walked up to every door and placed the book there, we were NOT to throw the phone books or to leave them in people’s driveways where maybe they get all wet and people complain.

And then there were rules about what to do with an aggressive dog… or when NOT to leave a book… And Carol really knew her stuff, she had a way she suggested doing everything to safely and securely get a book to each house.

Like she said, you should have a buddy and travel with a buddy. So one person can drive and one person can get out. The phonebooks arrived in big stacks wrapped in plastic that had to be cut open, and then each individual book had to be put in a plastic bag. Carol recommended bagging them one at a time as you go.

Now, it’s me in this orientation with mostly a bunch of professional delivery guys. Dudes with big vans, who drive for a living, and this is just one delivery gig they’re picking up. I had this little Saturn. And I was… maybe a little naive about the workload here.

We were each given a route, with hundreds of houses on it, and a load of books. We were told it would take about 2 days to complete it. I piled the books into the Saturn and they completely filled it. Filled up the back seat of the car, the front seat of the car, the trunk of the car. You could not see out the back window. And that was only half the load. First problem.

Second problem — I’d heard Carol’s advice to find a buddy, but I didn’t want to split my already low earnings. So I figured I could drive AND go drop the phone book. But of course that meant I had to keep parking the car and getting out and getting back in, which was a huge pain.

And then there was the bagging — I thought I knew better than Carol, I’d just pre-bag them. Open up the stack in my parent’s house, place each book into an individual bag, so it’s ready. And then I’ll bring them back in the car and have them ready to deliver. But the bags were slippery, so they’re like sliding all over the place. It made it so much harder. Carol knew what she was talking about,

I’d had this fantasy of my summer driving around, windows open, listening to my music, my own boss, a valued community member doing my civic duty….

But in reality I was stopping and starting all day, I did have music on but I was only hearing it in 15 second bursts. It was so hot, and I had no air conditioning so my windows were down, and the loose plastic bags were blowing all over the place…

MUSIC

But my biggest disillusionment… Carol really presented it like, you know, people value these phone books. And want these things and if they get wet or they get rained on or they get muddy or whatever, like, people are not going to be happy. So you need to safely get these books to these people in as best possible shape as you can and da da da da, respect the process basically. She really made it sound like this is for the good of the community, you need to get this important thing safely to each destination.

But again…. It’s 2011. People are saving their contacts in their phones. They’re using Google. At 28, I was not using a phone book anymore. But I took it for granted that it was something every household had: a physical address book, a newspaper subscription, and a fat stack of fading phone books.

But when I walked up to each door, tracker around my neck, ready to deliver this precious gift… I found that my neighbors, by and large, didn’t want them.

MUSIC

Ideally, no one was home, and I’d leave it and walk away. But sometimes people would answer and say, oh, I don’t want this. And I would just kind of say like, oh, well, I have to give it to you, which feels terrible.

One time this guy was in his driveway doing something in his garage and I walked up and I handed the book to him and he said thank you and then I turned and I walked away and I just kind of looked back and he put it right into his recycle bin. That was a little… disheartening.

I was supposed to finish my first route in two days, but it took me well over a week. The books sat in my car… I remember I gave a friend a ride and they were like sitting on top of all the books in the backseat. My mother was totally on my back about it, she was, she was like, you’re leaving all those phone books in the car?? Like, someone’s going to break in and take them. Somebody could sell them. And I’m trying to tell her, mom — nobody wants them. Nobody wants them. I can’t give them away. These are worthless. Worthless!

By the end of my second route, I was so discouraged, I quit. I think I told the guys at the dispatch center that I’d gotten a job nannying, which made me feel bad they were so sweet and supportive. I didn’t want to tell them I just couldn’t hack it.

It was nothing like delivering a newspaper, because people subscribe to the paper, and people who subscribe to the paper usually, at least in our household and me, love getting it. It’s so exciting, what’s in the paper today. This was not that. This was just like delivering advertisements to people that didn’t want them. It was basically spam mail — those pizza shop flyers that get slipped under your door.

So I was disappointed, but I also felt relieved that I didn’t have to do it anymore. I just went right back on Craigslist with new fantasies of what gig was going to be better.

MARTHA: [Flipping pages] More super bowl stuff, These commemorative sections they would put in the paper, I loved.

And I’ve never stopped loving the newspaper. I am a millennial… so I don’t have a print subscription anymore. But sometimes, my parents will still mail me clippings of significant moments — when the Eagles won the superbowl, when Jason Kelce made his retirement speech. It’s nostalgic, and it’s nice to have the tangible item.

MARTHA: It was something I knew I wanted a memento of

So yea, just like I had those Daily News covers on my wall as a teen, I pinned that Kelce article to my bulletin board.

Things like that, I make sure to get a copy

CREDITS