Paper trails.

• Position: UPFRONT - Managements of paperboys - Editorial

Every day but Sunday, I walked up to their front doors and left it on their porches. Each Friday, I'd stop to knock and collect what they owed. Nobody knew my neighborhood--the place and the people who lived there--better than I did when I was 12, not even the mailman. He was a grown-up, so people watched what they said and did when he was around, and he was only around when most of them were away at work. I was the paperboy, a kid whose delivery satchel served as a cloak of invisibility. I carried my route when folks were getting home and getting supper on the table. And since I walked rather than biked it, I saw and heard everything.

I knew who had a job and where and what they did there. I knew who had been laid off. I knew who was nice and who was not. I knew who were good providers, who took care of their families and kept up their property, and who were sorry sacks of, well, you know. I knew who drank too much, who feuded with their neighbors, who beat their wives and kids. (Fifty years later, I still remember a woman trying to hide her black eye behind the edge of the door as she handed me a quarter and a dime.) I knew all this about all of them because nearly everybody in my neighborhood subscribed to The Daily Times-News.

In the blue-collar section of Burlington where I grew up, 35 cents a week to have the paper delivered was no small expense. Many who lived there worked in the mills, and few made as much as $100 a week. But getting the paper was a necessity, not a luxury. A lot of folks also took the morning Greensboro Daily News. My parents subscribed to three dailies--those two plus the Durham Morning Herald, because my old man was a Blue Devils fanatic and its sports section had the best coverage...