The Newsboy

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In this Post:

• Lyndon Johnson
• Eugene McCarthy
• Robert Kennedy
• The Human Comedy

Credit: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Forty years ago today a California paperboy’s childhood essentially ended, with a loving and compassionate assist from his parents. This boy was 14, about as old as Homer McCauley, the sensitive Western Union messenger of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, who delivered death notices to the Gold Star mothers in the San Joaquin Valley during World War II. It was a different time, but there were other parallels as well.

The paperboy attended Joaquin Miller Junior High School in the Sacramento Valley. He delivered the San Francisco Chronicle, the preferred newspaper of many politically aware Northern Californians. His route was big: 90 papers delivered seven days-a-week on a bicycle stripped down for speed because his trip was five miles long.

Americans who lived through that year will always remember the national turmoil of 1968, especially the presidential campaign. The paperboy became interested in presidential politics a couple of years earlier when he read an article in the Weekly Reader about the war in Vietnam.  

To this day, the paperboy remembers that the article laid out the two compelling sides of the debate: How the South Vietnamese people wanted freedom; how the United States had given its word, and staked its prestige, on the outcome. But also: how the French had colonized Vietnam and the Vietnamese wanted to be free of foreign domination; how this was a civil war, fought many thousands of miles from our shores; how world opinion was turning against the United States. Perhaps all that was in the article—probably it wasn’t—but what is certain is that the paperboy began paying attention to presidential politics in elementary school.

Events in the spring of 1968 moved too fast for all of us, much too fast for a 14-year-old boy. On March 12, anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy gave President Johnson a scare in the New Hampshire primary and LBJ withdrew from consideration for re-election. Four days later Robert Kennedy entered the race. A month after that, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, a tragedy that seemed to take the steam out of McCarthy. It certainly sapped the paperboy's spirits. By the time of the June California primary, the Democratic race was between Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The paperboy switched affections again, to RFK. It was a short-lived love affair. He watched the election returns the night of June 5, saw that Bobby had won, and went to bed relatively early, as a teenager will do when the alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m.

He didn't sleep that late, however. At 4:30 in the morning, his mother came into his room and said he had to get up and deliver the papers early and he had to know, before doing so, that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles. The out-of-town editions of the San Francisco Chronicle did not have the news that people needed to know: That less than five years after his brother had been assassinated, RFK had also been wounded, and was probably going to die.

“Where’s dad?” the paperboy asked. The answer was that his father, a newspaperman, was still at work.

“He stayed there all night,” she said. “But he called with the latest bulletin. He told me to write this down for you.”

With that, this mother fought back her own tears and handed her oldest son a three-by-five card with the grim word from Los Angeles.

 “No one will be awake at this hour.” the paperboy protested.

“Yes,” his mother said softly. “They will. And they’ll want to know what happened.”

She was right. At every other house, it seemed, in these pre-cable, pre-Internet days, a light was on, and through the windows the paperboy could see sad people at their kitchen tables, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, some with their face in their hands. At many houses, the resident—usually the woman of the house—came outside to meet the paperboy, who dutifully recited the information on his little card. Sometimes the women would start crying. Several of them hugged the boy in their grief.

The paper route usually took an hour. That morning, it took three. I am that paperboy, of course. And if it’s too melodramatic to say that the kid who delivered those papers began his rounds as a boy and finished it as a man, this much is true: When I was done delivering those papers, I had an abiding interest in the presidency, and a searing appreciation for the power of the news. Neither of those feelings have ever left me. For that, midway between Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, let me say: Thanks mom. Thanks dad.

 I’d also make the following observation: Although these are trying times in our country, we’ve been through much worse—and not all that long ago. I always say a little prayer at this time of the year for the presidential candidates, all of them, even knowing, as our greatest president reminded us at his second inauguration, that the Almighty’s purposes are His own.

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