When I was a kid I had two ways of making a buck. I mowed yards and I delivered newspapers. In those days, the throbbing metropolis of Muncie, Indiana had two daily publications. The Morning Star and the Evening Press were of the old style newspaper variety with ink on regulation sized paper. I delivered the morning paper seven days a week and the only way I ever got a day off was when I could convince a friend or classmate to take over my route while we went on vacation.

I started delivering newspapers early, usually 5:30am. Can you imagine sending your kids out on a bicycle in the pre-dawn mornings of our current world?

I still chuckle, and sometimes curse under my breath, about the customers I had who never seemed to have 70 cents whenever I came to collect payment. But thinking about it while writing this, that was probably more than made up for by the tips and gifts from the many kind and generous customers along my route.

Over the course of the 14 months I delivered newspapers, I managed to save enough to buy a Heathkit HW-16 transceiver - paper route money was an important link in my life story!

Alas, the two Muncie newspapers melded into a single publication with the paradigm shift that decimated the print publication business and has been in steady decline ever since. These days it’s a once a day publication, about a quarter the size of the original newspapers, and where there had once been a multi-story office building brimming with staff, now there are only a couple of local reporters and columnists still on the payroll. Most of the news is taken from syndication.

And recently announced, distribution of the print publication will no longer be done by paper boys. The newspaper company has brokered some sort of arrangement with the Postal Service to have mail carriers deliver newspapers to those remaining customers still willing to pay hundreds of dollars each year to have a tiny printed newspaper stuffed in their home mailbox five days a week.

It’s the end of another era. While actual newspapers are fairly meaningless to me in this century, the action still evokes a deep feeling of loss in the pit of my stomach, not unlike the feeling I get when I walk into a store and discover they have adopted the self-checkout model. I despise these places and try to avoid them though that’s becoming more difficult.

I’ve noticed when I say such things outloud about half those listening are sympathetic to my view point while the other half tells me “the only thing constant is change, you gotta get over it and go with the flow, this is the future…”

Clearly, half the people I talk with are blathering idiots.