Each morning for the past six years, I have got up at 4 o'clock in the morning, sometimes to a cold tenement apartment and ice cold wooden floor -- and once or twice to ice cold water that my mother threw in my face to wake me up -- and then pulled on my clothes to leave the house. In the dark I have walked to the newspaper office to pick up the first of two
Along my way I sometimes see some of the people who work for the newspaper hustling along their way to get to work themselves. Most of them are people just like you or me. Some of them, though, are the most colorful group of characters you will ever meet.
Delivering the first group of bundles to tenements and houses, I have seen an eyeful and heard an earful in my time doing this, from married couples fighting or making up. I have helped deliver two babies and found an abandoned newborn baby once. I have seen married pillars of the community parting with his or her lover and sometimes they have seen me, too.
This being Prohibition times, I have seen liquor delivered in the dark before dawn to the speakeasy, numbers and rackets henchmen breaking legs to settle gambling debts and other unthinkable things as I come and go. Nobody knows, but I also saw a man brutally murdered last year when I delivered my second bundle of papers to the stores and businesses that you see behind me.
Once thing is for sure -- there is more going on in this city than what you will ever read about in these daily newspapers that I deliver.
It was a pleasure talking to you today. Look for me tomorrow and I will tell you about the people who work at the Cheesemill. That's what we call the newspaper office. My last delivery of the morning is to the home of its ruthless publisher. He is last on the delivery route so that he knows for certain that the whole city got its paper on time. It is almost going on 6 o'clock now and he's waiting. I have to be getting along my way. Every morning it's the same thing... I see him peeking out his curtains, looking at his pocket watch as I walk towards his front door for his delivery. If he were paying attention to something or someone other than me, he might notice his wife's boyfriend leaving from the back guest house almost each morning at 5:55.
Till next time,
Your friend,
Gordy