Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel Read Free Book Online Page A

usually be able to catch him. I can’t now.
     
    Will your experience as a newsboy help you get along in the world?
     
    Oh yeah. You can get a good job as a salesman, like selling encyclopedias and stuff in your later life. I would. Because you would get a lot of money.

CLIFF PICKENS
    A colleague of Billy Carpenter, he too is twelve. He has fifty-four customers.
     
    It’s fun throwing papers. Sometimes you get it on the roof. But I never did that. You throw the paper off your bicycle and it lands some place in the bushes. It’ll hit part of the wall and it’ll bounce down into the bushes and the bushes are so thick that it’ll go—boongg! That’s pretty fun, because I like to see it go boongg! (Laughs.) It bounces about a foot high. You never expect bushes to bounce. I always get it out of the bushes and throw it back on their porch.
    The people down at the pool hall, they reach back in my basket while I’m not lookin’ and steal my papers. But they always give ’em back. They just tease me. I don’t know their names. They’re all kinds of guys, young guys, older guys. I usually go up there and say, “Okay, hand it over. I know you guys stuff it up your shirt.” If they don’t give it to me, I raise up their shirt and grab it. It’s good to be a newsboy. You get to really like people.

TERRY PICKENS
    Cliff’s brother. He is fourteen. He has a Prince Valiant haircut. He is Newburgh’s leading collector of rock recordings as well as its most avid reader of science fiction. There are fifty-seven customers on his paper route, yet it takes him considerably longer to get his work done than Cliff or Billy. “I ride the bike all over the place. I go both sides of the street. Cliff hasn’t got any hills. Mine’s all hills.”
     
    I’ve been having trouble collecting. I had one woman hid from me once. I had another woman tell her kids to tell me she wasn’t home. He says, “Mom, newsboy.” She says (whispers), “Tell him I’m not home.” I could hear it from the door. I came back in half an hour and she paid me. She’s not a deadbeat. They’ll pay you if you get ’em. Sometimes you have to wait . . .
    If I don’t catch ‘em at home, I get pretty mad. That means I gotta come back and come back and come back and come back until I catch’em. Go around about nine o‘clock at night and seven o’clock in the morning. This one guy owed me four dollars. He got real mad at me for comin’ around at ten o’clock. Why’d I come around so late? He probably was mad’cause I caught him home. But he paid me. I don’t care whether he gets mad at me, just so I get paid.
    I like to have money. It’s nice to have money once in a while instead of being flat broke all the time, Most of my friends are usually flat broke. I spent $150 this summer. On nothing—candy, cokes, games of pool, games of pinball. We went to McDonald’s a couple of times. I just bought anything I wanted. I wonder where the money went. I have nothing to show for it. I’m like a gambler, the more I have, the more I want to spend. That’s just the way I am.
    It’s supposed to be such a great deal. The guy, when he came over and asked me if I wanted a route, he made it sound so great. Seven dollars a week for hardly any work at all. And then you find out the guy told you a bunch of bull. You mistrust the people. You mistrust your customers because they don’t pay you sometimes.
    Then you get mad at the people at the printing corporation. You’re supposed to get fify-seven papers. They’ll send me forty-seven or else they’ll send me sixty-seven. Sunday mornings they get mixed up. Cliff’ll have ten or eleven extras and I’ll be ten or eleven short. That happens all the time. The printers, I don’t think they care. They make all these stupid mistakes at least once a week. I think they’re half-asleep or something. I do my job, I don’t see why they can’t do theirs. I don’t like my job any more than they do.
    Sunday morning at