Route ’56

A Dallas Summer

This memoir is the product of two samples of text that passed in front of me this past month. The first was from the July 15 edition of the New York Times. A migrant from New Hampshire, Ruth Graham, wrote an article, “Living Through Texas’ Hottest Summer”, or “Sweating in Dallas”. She had written, “The high here in Dallas has been at least 100 degrees for 11 days this month, and has barely dipped below 95 since early June.”

The second was an email from my cousin Michael on Sunday, July 24. Michael and I grew up together in Dallas. He will be approaching his eightieth birthday in early October, whereas I, being 3 weeks younger, will have mine later in the month. His life has taken him to Italy, far from Dallas. He wrote me, “Dispatch from Trento, formerly a city of moderate temperature, even in August. At 7pm it is 101. Everything that used to be green is the color of burnt toast. Right now I am beginning to think the only difference between here and West Texas is that here the pizza is better.”

I am unable to read these reports without thinking of my own recollections. Specifically, they put me in mind of the summer of 1956, when I had a paper route, delivering the afternoon daily, “The Dallas Times Herald”. During that summer, I would be found in the afternoon, waiting with 2 or 3 other boys on the corner of Wycliff and Gilbert, as a delivery truck rumbled up, paused, and a dozen or so wire-bound bundles of newspapers hit the curb, tossed from the back of the truck.

We didn’t call ourselves ‘newsboys’; that was the term for kids you saw in movies, with papers under their arm shouting, “Extra, extra, read all about it!”. No, we were ‘paper boys’ and we had paper routes, we delivered papers. We were small businessmen, running our own operation, with a territory containing our subscribers. We delivered their newspaper every day, tossing it in front of their door, on their steps or front porch; and coming around every month with a coupon book to collect for our services. The collection process often lasted a week or so, usually because the people were not home, or sometimes because they asked for more time to cough up the dollar or so we collected at the end of the month. Only then, could the money we made be calculated. The formula was simple: what we collected from our subscribers at the end of the month, less the money we had paid for the newspapers, up front, at the beginning of the month. I must have made somewhere between 10 to 20 dollars a month. I think, maybe once, I almost hit 30 dollars. For someone like myself, still only 13, it was better than nothing. Besides it was the only job in town.

This corner was on the edge of my territory. It was also the point where the territories of 3 or 4 paper routes intersected. The appearance of the truck was our signal to get to work. We would wrestle our bundles from the gutter into stacks; someone usually had a wire cutter, which was passed around and shared. Then we would sit around and fold our papers vertically by thirds, securing them with a rubber band, and inserting them into our canvas bags. Some boys carried two, one on each shoulder. I was small for my age, and could only manage one. I would sling my bag over my shoulder and head off to deliver, returning to fill up. The only saving grace was that your work became easier or lighter as you emptied your bag along your route.

Sometimes I was able to borrow a neighbor kid’s red wagon, so I could transport all my papers on wheels to a more central point on my route, where I could just shoulder my bag with enough papers for both sides of the street before circling back to the corner where I left the wagon. (The idea that someone might take it never entered my mind. That stuff just did not occur.)

What does this have to do with the weather? Whenever I see something about how hot it is today, I remember that summer. What comes to mind is me sitting with the other paper boys, preparing my papers for delivery, and while slipping over the rubber band, seeing a small black bordered box in the upper right corner of the front page that said, “Today is the Xth day in a row hitting 100 degrees”. I watched that X increment itself, day after day, (to well into the upper 20’s, according to my faulty memory). Now here is the weird part, which I have difficulty connecting to any rational response to that little text box on the front page. I wasn’t upset reading this announcement; I didn’t see it as some token of suffering, rather I read it with something like pride. I think I might even have been disappointed when the heat wave finally broke and the corner of the paper was empty. Maybe it was the pride that comes from an attitude that says, “whatever you can throw at us, we can take”; or maybe it’s from bravado, like George W’s infamous “Bring it on”. (Remember, I was a kid, and kids are stupid.)

I only had my paper route for less than a year. I started it in the dead of winter and gave it up soon after I began the 9th grade that fall, which put me in a new school, Hillcrest High, many miles away from where I lived. So I have no doubt that I was remembering the summer of 1956. I wondered, from the perspective of today, how hot was that summer, really. Am I remembering that corner of the front page accurately? Today, with the Internet, I was able to google up a daily temperature chart for Dallas and I selected 2 months, July and August 1956. I found that between July 12 and August 19, (a period of 38 days), the high temperature was never lower than 95, and for 27 of those days, it was 100 degrees or higher, hitting that 100 degree mark 16 days in a row during August. Yes, I slightly exaggerated the summer heat of 1956, but to the credit of my memory processing neural networks, my recollection was pretty much in the ball park.

I guess this memoir boils down to where the arc of history is destined to take us. Optimists, like Barak Obama, quoting Martin Luther King, will say that the arc of history bends toward justice. On the other hand, my cousin Michael is convinced that the world will end soon. His arc of history is ending because of global warming, hastened by mankind’s stupidity and greed. It’s not a particularly optimistic view but he wants to sound an alarm. The news is already grim with weather extremes and uncontrolled fires out West. No doubt the world is in for a lot of tragedy. My actuarial future is such that I probably won’t be much affected now, any more than 1956, but I fear for what lays ahead for my grandchildren. Still and all, I remain optimistic for the long term. My arc of history is more realistic. It’s not that we will become less stupid and greedy over time. To believe that would require that I give up my cynicism, which I am not about to do. I guess I feel that ultimately we will decide there is more money to be made in technologies that stymie global warming, and (pardon my pun) greed will trump stupidity. And we will continue to evolve for the better, come what may.