It Happened on 15th Street

On that fateful evening, it was warm and I was wearing a short sleeve shirt. I was 10 years old, walking alone down the middle of N. 15th Street in my hometown, Arlington, Virginia. I had a paper route then, delivering the Evening Star to houses and apartments on either side of Washington Boulevard. I was out that day to collect the month’s subscription fee from my customers. The timing was crucial: You tried to catch people around dinner time to make sure somebody would be home.

That was part of the deal between paperboys and newspapers in the middle of the 20th century. Not only was it your job to deliver the paper every weekday afternoon after school and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. You were also responsible for collecting payments from the subscribers and turning over the lion’s share—mostly cash—to your route manager. Your take was the difference between the subscription price and what you were charged per customer. If a customer stiffed you, the money came out of your pocket.

I liked collection days because when I finished, I was flush with cash, at least temporarily. I could walk two blocks to the Drug Fair in the Westover shopping center, hop up on a stool at the soda fountain, and get a cherry Coke for 10 cents. I felt like a man of means sitting there, sipping on that super-sweet, ice-cold beverage.

For ambitious paperboys, the Evening Star ran sales contests. The more subscriptions you sold, the better the prizes. Your route manager would give you free sample copies you could use to entice people to sign up. I had done well enough in the latest contest to win something I had coveted for months: a Zenith transistor radio. I was carrying that prize in my shirt pocket that evening, tuned to WPGC, the most popular top-40 station in the D.C. area. As I walked along, I could listen to hits like “Cathy’s Clown” by the Everly Brothers through the earpiece.

The paper route hadn’t been mine alone for long. My older brother Johnny and I shared it for a while. The two of us would leave our house, pulling our red Radio Flyer wagon, and walk half a mile to the corner of Jefferson Street and Washington Boulevard where our papers were waiting at the curb. We’d cut open the bundles, fold the papers, load them in the wagon, and then set out on our route. When we finished, we liked to take the Flyer to the top of the hill on Kentucky Street, climb in, one behind the other, and barrel down the bumpy sidewalk. I don’t remember who steered. We crashed a few times, but that only made us laugh harder. 

That evening when I was strolling up 15th Street, I’m not sure what I was thinking. I had my transistor radio in my pocket, so I’m sure I was listening to WPGC. Halfway down the street, the cover on a small pipe embedded in the middle of the asphalt caught my eye. It was about six inches wide with the word “WATER” imprinted in capital letters. My curiosity got the better of me, so I walked over. The cover didn’t appear to be bolted down. So I bent over, grabbed the cover in my right hand, and lifted it off the pipe. Before I knew it, my radio slipped out of my shirt pocket, fell straight into the pipe, and disappeared into the water without a sound. I was left with nothing but the earpiece and the wire that had pulled out of the radio.

My stint as a paperboy taught me several important lessons. Delivering papers seven days a week was sheer drudgery. I was painfully shy, so dealing with customers wasn’t easy for me. Adding cherry-flavored syrup to a Coke makes it too sweet. The dimensions of a Zenith transistor radio allow it to slip perfectly down a six-inch pipe. And the Buddha was correct. If you wish to achieve peace and enlightenment, you must abandon attachments to material things because one day, without warning, they may suddenly disappear.