I really mean “delivered,” as in to a doorstep. It was August 9, 1974 and I was an elementary school paper boy in Norwood, Massachusetts.

My brother Chris and I had a paper route dropping off the latest editions of the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald American, now  the Boston Herald. They were morning papers, so we had to deliver them before school started, many times before the sun came up. We would drive our bikes, (that’s me with my Huffy and David Cassidy hair) and carry a bag with a reflective orange strap over our shoulders. On rainy or snowy days my mother would drive us around in her green Ford Torino station wagon with the stacks of papers in the back.  It was a different world then.  Today, I’m not sure a ten year old should be out in the dark before dawn.

My brother and I…