By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
For several months in 1974 during my early teen years, I delivered The Ogden Standard-Examiner—my hometown daily newspaper—to the doorsteps of my neighbors. In return, they gave me unexpected and unforgettable glimpses into the darker side of life.
I have many fond memories of Ogden, Utah during those boyhood years a half century ago, for reasons I explain in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings. My newspaper route, however, provided ample evidence that sometimes life just does not work out the way we want.
The headlines I read in the newspapers I delivered set this melancholy tone.
For example, after another Arab/Israeli war, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) refused to sell oil to the United States for several months in 1974, causing long lines at gas stations and soaring fuel prices. The Watergate scandal unfolded the same year, eroding trust in national institutions and forcing President Richard Nixon to resign in August.
Locally, soon-to-be-notorious law student Ted Bundy had started kidnapping and killing young Utah women in the Fall of 1974. A few months earlier, a group of men brutally murdered three people and wounded two others during the robbery of the Hi Fi Shop, a downtown Ogden music store just two blocks from my home.
Some of my neighbors/customers also were making the news, rather than just reading it.
We resided in an upstairs two-bedroom flat in the Towne Apartments, a complex of about sixty rental units at 2638 Adams Avenue in Ogden, and our neighbors were quite diverse. Thanks to reasonable rents and close proximity to downtown, there were singles, young couples, and even older retired folks living there.
There also seemed to be a young female LGBTQ+ couple in the neighborhood. Probably because the world was quite cruel to gay and lesbian folks back then, they kept to themselves and left their shades pulled down.
I was the only kid in the apartment complex, and thus a bit out of place and an object of some curiosity. I met some, but only a few, neighbors as I skipped through the outdoor corridors to get our daily mail or played games alone on the long rectangular lawn in the center of the three tenement buildings.
One day while I was cavorting around, the teenage girl who delivered our newspapers parked her bike and approached me. She said she was giving up her paper route and wondered if I wanted it.
I was interested. I did not have two pennies to rub together and was too young to work anywhere else. I also had previous relevant experience, specifically a “job” selling TV Guide magazines in another neighborhood.
After getting my mother’s permission, I signed up to be a twentieth century newsie. A few days later, someone from the newspaper’s sales department called and told me to report to the local distribution point close to our apartment.
Six afternoons and one Sunday morning each week, a vast network of individual carriers like me delivered some 25,000 copies of The Standard-Examiner’s printed news products. Each small city-block-sized local paper route like mine was part of a larger precinct managed by a distribution agent.
Every day, rain or shine, a truck delivered newspapers in huge bundles to the distribution agent’s home. The individual carriers then would meet at that house to collect their share of the papers for delivery.
Our local agent was a bespectacled woman in her early fifties named Marion Howard. Mrs. Howard lived two blocks from me, just past 28th Street on Adams Avenue in Ogden.
She was a kind but firm supervisor. Every day on her front lawn, porch, or living room floor, Mrs. Howard directed us carriers to our allocated papers, helped us fold and load them into our bike bags, and chatted amiably while we all worked together.
If anyone was ever late (like I was early one Sunday morning when I overslept), Mrs. Howard called to make sure you were ok. Once she knew you were in good health, she’d directly but politely urge you to come get your papers and deliver them as soon as possible.
During one of my many chats with her, I learned Mrs. Howard had three sons. One of them, named David, was just a few years older than me. He attended the local St. Joseph Catholic high school I would eventually attend, and would be a senior there when I was a freshman.
The Standard-Examiner did not pay me an employee’s salary. Instead, I was an independent contractor. In effect, the company sold me newspapers at a discounted price and I resold them to the customers on my route with a slight markup also established by the company.
At the end of each month I had to go door-to-door to collect from my enrolled customers. I got to keep everything above a certain threshold I paid the company. This arrangement would have been fine, except almost every month a couple of customers did not pay me, thus regularly cutting into my already thin profit margin.
I was naïve, and assumed people would pay their bills as promised when they signed up for home delivery of the paper. Sadly, some customers proved me quite wrong, using several methods of deception in the process.
One popular tactic was to ghost me when I came by to collect. Often I’d hear shuffling or shushing and other noises inside the house or apartment when I rang or knocked, but no one ever answered the door. Knocking again rarely achieved a better result.
When by chance I did get someone to answer the door (usually by accident) or if I fortuitously caught them on the front porch or stairs, another popular deception tactic was to ask me to come back the next day, which allegedly was “pay day.”
When I returned the next day, as you might expect, my evasive customer had reverted back to deception tactic number one—not answering the door. Or sometimes customers refused to pay by claiming the papers had never arrived or were stolen. Alas, I had no contrary proof except my solemn word that I had delivered.
My only remedy for such deception was to stop delivery. By that point, however, I’d already paid my supplier, so the end result was me involuntarily giving away free newspapers to deadbeat customers.
Although I lost some money, I did earn some hard-won wisdom. People do not always do what they say they’ll do, and in the process they will deceive you.
Although my other customers were not deadbeats, some of them ended up dead. A couple of old neighbors passed away while I was their paper boy.
One was 82-year old Fred Naisbitt. I met him one day after I’d finished my delivery duties. I was hitting a tennis ball against the front rock wall of the apartment complex.
He was nice, and did not complain about the annoying thuds. Instead, he sat nearby and talked while I imagined I was Jimmy Connors battling Bjorn Borg at the Wimbledon championship match.
From time to time after that introduction, when he saw me he’d come out and chat. He told me about his life, including how he had enjoyed owning the Hermitage, a resort in nearby Ogden Canyon.
He explained how President William Howard Taft had visited there in about 1909, long before Mr. Naisbitt owned it. That original building burned down 20 years later.
I knew the remaining building that Mr. Naisbitt had owned, a large carousel log cabin bar and grill that we drove past every week on the way to visit our friends at the Trappist monastery in Huntsville.
During one conversation, he told me that he liked how I phonetically pronounced his name “Naysbitt” instead of saying “Nezbit” like everyone else did. He said it was more authentic.
It was the last time we talked.
A few days later, on April 22, 1974, he blacked out while driving his car and crashed off an embankment of the Ogden River. He died just down the road from his beloved Hermitage. I read about it in the newspaper I delivered.
One of my other customers, an old married couple, lived downstairs from us, just across the courtyard from Mr. Naisbitt. They’d sit together on lawn chairs outside their front door each afternoon and wait for me to deliver the newspaper.
The older woman was nice, but got a bit agitated if I did not deliver the newspaper at the time she expected it. Her fretting annoyed me a little back then because there was no set deadline except “the afternoon.”
Now I get it. Reading the news probably was a highlight of her day. It was hard to wait too long.
One night there was lots of commotion from their apartment. Police and paramedics arrived. We rushed downstairs to see if we could help.
The older woman was standing outside while medics hovered over her husband, who had collapsed on the apartment floor inside. My mother walked over and hugged her.
I blurted out, “He’ll be OK!” She looked at me with tears in her eyes, and said, “He really will, Mike, right?” He wasn’t OK. He passed away that same night. I felt really bad about the false hope I had delivered to her.
After that night, I never again saw her sitting outside her door on her lawn chair waiting for me to deliver the newspaper.
Way at the other end of the apartment complex, I also delivered newspapers to Mrs. Josephine Hayes. To my untrained eye, she seemed about 90. She rarely came outside.
She also took a really long time to answer her doorbell when I stopped by to collect the monthly payment for the newspaper, but she always paid in full. One day, during a collection visit, she asked me to take out her trash.
I did and she gave me an extra quarter. Thereafter, when she saw me she asked me to do other little odd jobs. I tried to help her, but sort of dreaded it too. She was never able to fully zip up the back of her dress, her hair was ratty, and her apartment smelled bad.
Almost always, she asked me to clean up some bit of spilled food on her kitchen floor. Often, a line of small black ants traveled to and from this pungent cache. I told my mother about her.
Mrs. Hayes was gone a short time later. I do not know exactly what happened.
She may have passed away. Mom may have told someone else about her situation, and friends or family intervened and found a place that provided Mrs. Hayes with better care than mine.
I nodded when Mom said, “No one should have to live with ants swarming all around!” It seemed like a good solution at the time, but I did not yet understand the nexus between self-esteem and the ability to care for one’s self.
Since then, I’ve speculated in my mind that perhaps ants are exactly what Ms. Hayes wanted.
Some ants live in anthills. Other ants like to chat, sit on lawn chairs waiting for the paper, are confused and have ratty gray hair, and live in apartment complexes.
Despite their differences, they all want to be part of a colony. As a boy, I wish I’d known more about old folks and ants.
As sad as was the deception, death, and dementia I saw while bringing The Standard-Examiner to my neighbors, the most dreadful news from my paper route was yet to be delivered.
(Next week, part two of Deception, Death, Dementia, and Double Homicide on my little newspaper route.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
