My Turn: Sweet Sundays included Dad's newspaper route

Saturday nights we had a routine. I had a bath and then Mom “set” my hair by twirling the small dark-brown sections around her finger and using dozens of bobby pins to hold them tight as I sat on the thin, green carpet in front of the TV in our small living room.

I was sent off to bed early. “We have a big day tomorrow,” Dad would say. He had a paper route, called Bob’s Newspaper Delivery Service. Every morning, for eight years, he got up at 4 a.m., picked up his load of papers and delivered them all over West Islip by throwing them wrapped in a rubber band onto his customers’ driveways and walkways. Then he went to work as a custodian or, in later years, as a mail clerk for the Plainview Old-Bethpage School District. Mom was the administrative side of the Bob’s business, handwriting the bills and addressing the envelopes, collecting the money and paying for the papers each week.

On Sundays, we all helped Dad with his route.

Earlier on Saturdays, my father set up the wooden horses in the garage and placed old doors and plywood sheets on top to make tables where we “assembled” the Sunday papers: Newsday, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Daily News among them. The magazine section and all the advertisements had to be inserted into each paper to be hand delivered to the front doors of 800 customers on Sundays. For this he needed a team of people. Dad hired some men to do part of the route, and mom did one, too. I helped my dad and when my brother, Bobby, was old enough, he joined us.

The back of the old blue Rambler was loaded up. Dad delivered to the left side of the street, and I had the right. “Times to 210,” he’d say. I’d grab a Times from the back stack and run to the front door. I held the paper in my right hand as I opened the screen door with my left hand and swung it in fast and shut the door, as I’d been taught. Sometimes, the Times was so big I had trouble holding it in my 10-year-old hand, so I had to place it in the bottom of the door and quickly shut the screen door and hope it held. I scooted back into the car to rest and warm up until the next stop. I remember winters when my feet were so cold they pinched.

Four or five hours later, the back of the car was empty and we were on our way to the neighborhood soda fountain shop on Udall Road. I sat at the counter on a shiny red stool as Dad ordered, “two chocolate egg creams.” I was a little embarrassed to be seen with my pin-curled head wrapped in a scarf and my hands black from the newspapers, but I wanted that soda. And oh, the sweetness of it!

After a hearty breakfast for all back home, Dad would settle into his recliner by the front door and read the paper, a favorite position and occupation of his for all the years of my memory of him. We cleaned up and mom got the sauce going for the Italian feast we’d have later.

Off came my scarf and out popped a mass of curls! We would dress in our Sunday best and leave Dad to an hour of peace as we trooped off to the Latin Mass at St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church in Brentwood. “Stir the sauce,” mom would say, and he did.

Joan Eisele-Cooper,

Bay Shore