The Dayton Shopping News

[grampahol]

Just wondering if any old timers from Dayton remember that paper delivered free to nearly every home Every Wednesday in Montgomery County until the 1970s when it folded.
I had a route of over 300 houses my brother and I delivered.
Some kids cheated and didn't bother to deliver them and got paid anyway, but on average most did get delivered. The last thing I was ever going to do was not deliver every paper with my mom keeping her eye on everything.. I wasn't suicidal at 12 ..
My dad was the managing editor of the paper, but it folded because the company ownership refused to modernize the printing equipment and stuck with lead type until it was financially unfeasable to turn a profit. Some other factors contributed as well like the union printers scale was too high to support an ad based paper anymore..
Just wondering if anyone remembered the Dayton Shopping News..

[grampahol]

I guess nobody remembers.. It was all ads and coupons, not exactly a great read full of insightful up to date information other than advertising, but at least it was never one of those trashy plastic bag deals filled with crappy, useless coupons for crap nobody ever uses that ends up as trash in your front yard.. We actually had to attach them to the front doorknobs instead of throwing them in peoples driveways and yards.. 

[grampahol]

I guess nobody remembers.. It was all ads and coupons, not exactly a great read full of insightful up to date information other than advertising, but at least it was never one of those trashy plastic bag deals filled with crappy, useless coupons for crap nobody ever uses that ends up as trash in your front yard.. We actually had to attach them to the front doorknobs instead of throwing them in peoples driveways and yards.. 

How many of you had your own paper routes as kids? 

[BengalHawk62]

I was too scared. And too young, but I remember this.



https://iowacoldcases.org/case-summaries/johnny-gosch/


Twelve-year-old Des Moines Register paperboy Johnny Gosch left his West Des Moines home on Sunday morning, September 5, 1982, to begin his paper route. He wore a white sweatshirt with ‘Kim’s Academy’ on the back, warm-up pants, blue rubber flip-flops, and carried a yellow paper-bag.

Normally, his father, John Gosch, accompanied him on the route, but on this day Johnny went alone.

He never came home.

What happened after that has been the subject of speculation for more than three decades.

[*Awful Llama*]

Yeah, we had something similar to that where lived, and we referred to it as the Shoppers News. Different paper from the DDN, but the same concept. My mom was always asking me where it was, she looked forward to its delivery each week.

I delivered newspapers myself when I was 12. After about six months I became totally bored with the whole enterprise and begged to be let out of my obligation. I did it a week or two longer until they found someone else to take my route. Now our paper gets delivered by an adult in a pickup truck who delivers to so many places it would have taken me days to make one circuit. So it goes.

[grampahol]

I remember my very first Journal Herald route.. The first week after getting up around 4am and delivering all those papers then going door to door Saturday afternoon to collect payments..at the end of the week I'd earned a whole whopping 10¢ .. I was pissed to say the least..lol About 8 houses on my route didn't get newspapers again until they paid me in full and even after then I didn't make much.. 
I always got paid for the Shopping news route because my dad was the managing editor.. 

[*Awful Llama*]

(01-15-2018, 12:44 PM)grampahol Wrote: I remember my very first Journal Herald route.. The first week after getting up around 4am and delivering all those papers then going door to door Saturday afternoon to collect payments..at the end of the week I'd earned a whole whopping 10¢ .. I was pissed to say the least..lol About 8 houses on my route didn't get newspapers again until they paid me in full and even after then I didn't make much.. 
I always got paid for the Shopping news route because my dad was the managing editor.. 

When I started my route, unbeknownst to me, I was delivering to a house that wasn't actually subscribing to the paper.  I collected every other week, so after two weeks of getting the paper, even greeting me at the door once or twice as I delivered it, the smiling elderly lady informed me on day 15 that, nope, she wasn't a subscriber.  So  I had to pay for her two weeks' worth of reading. Old bag    Didn't help sell me on the newspaper business.

[grampahol]

The kid that lived across the street from us at around age 20 pulled off a robbery of one of the last paper boys.. Of course he got caught and sent to prison for a few years. I heard that he had told the judge his reason for robbing him.. "I didn't know he was under the age of 18" AS IF that was a good reason to rob a paper boy..
I ran into him a few years back and asked him about the robbery. He acknowledged that was by far the stupidest thing he'd even done.
He more or less got his act together later on, married with a few kids and doing ok, but for quite some time his life in the old neighborhood wasn't worth spit..EVERYBODY knew about it and he was never well liked before the robbery. Theirs was an extremely disfunctional family. The only girl in the family joined the Navy and turned to lesbianism and has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of them. She attended my mother's funeral and in her 50s was still damn hot looking for an old lesbian....which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story.. I just thought it was amusing..