The Sunday first edition

I do commercial deliveries of the state’s largest newspaper, a Pulitzer prize winning rag.  The Sunday paper comes in two editions, the early or first edition, on Saturday morning, and the final edition, which begins printing at about 11:20 Saturday night.

For awhile there, we were near the beginning of the run – once, even second.  I had our papers before midnight.  It was so cool!  I drive down to the plant on Saturday nights, and the number two driver goes down on Saturday mornings.  We each grab all the distributor’s papers and divide them up on this side of the river.

The papers were exceptionally late Saturday morning.  It was the one day I don’t have to get up at 5:40 am, and I did anyway, it’s so much of a habit.  I waited around for hours to hear from number two, and then finally called him, to find that there was about an hour more of waiting.  I meandered my way up to where we meet to divvy up papers.

He’s a big guy, number two, and he’s much slower on these routes than either the boss or myself.  I’ve ended up taking more than half the distributor’s papers for my route, and I still finish before number two.

On this Saturday, I was two thirds of the way done with my deliveries, and was contratulating myself on getting a parking spot for the stepvan within a block of Starbucks at Bybee.  I wheeled their 12 Sunday papers in on the hand truck – the papers were in bundles of fat sevens this week – and went back to my white stepvan, arranged some of the bundles in the stepvan for the next couple of stops, and keyed the ignition.

Nothing happened.

It was completely silent, the starter.  I had plenty of juice in the battery, and the starter had been groaning all morning and just barely starting, and I knew this was it, it was never gonna start now.

The starter is toast.

And, I still had more than 140 papers to deliver.

I called the boss’s cellphone, which rang but eventually went to voicemail.  I knew he’d done the Saturday papers that morning, and was likely asleep in bed.  I called number two, but he had at least an hours more deliveries to make himself.  I was pretty much on my own.

The Starbucks there at Bybee and Milwaukie is just about 15 minutes walk from my apartment, and more importantly, my parking lot, where my former newspaper minivan sat.  I walked home, calling everyone on the way to say I had it under control, that I was gonna finish the route in my van.

I was really lucky to find a spot just ahead of my dead stepvan – Bybee is a very busy street, Saturday afternoons, and I had 21 bundles of papers to move to my van.  I retired the van from paper deliveries last October, because it was wearing out, and reinstalled the seats behind the driver.  21 bundles fit right in though, and off I went, driving about 8 miles to finish the route and drop those last 140 papers.

I got a call from the boss right after I’d laid down to sleep that afternoon, and he told me to take the grey stepvan downtown that night to get all the papers, and to meet him at the usual place; that he was going to use his Town and Country minivan to drop off the south route’s papers.

There was a long wait to get the papers – we were second from last this morning, and I didn’t get our papers until 1:40.  I met the boss and he took about half of what he needed and arranged to meet me later to get the rest, and I took of on my route, which begins more or less where we meet to divvy up the laod.

I hadn’t driven the gray one in a long time.  It’s a few years older than my white stepvan, and it has an all steel body, so it’s heavier on the road and rides a little nicer than mine does. The grey one’s got an eager 350 v-8 in it too.  It leaks like a sieve in the rain, but it was dry this morning, so no problems there.

The boss took 280 papers with him the first time, but I didn’t see him again til I was 2/3’s of the way through my whole route, and I’ve got 686 papers on my list.  Hmm.

We met, he got his other share of the papers (he miscounted too – I was way short at the end of my run and he had to drive out of his way to do those stops. Serves him right, eh?) and I finished my last dozen stops.  The white stepvan was still up on Bybee, and we were going to drag it back to the store where we park them after the routes, so I had a bit of a wait for the boss to finish his route.

It turns out that a Town and Country AWD minivan has good use as a tow vehicle – we had towed my Voyager minivan serveral times already, and this morning, we used it to tow the much larger stepvan back to our parking lot with no problems.

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Now, if only some automotive fairy would fly by and fix my van’s leaky transmission, not helped by yesterday;s load of papers, it would be so cool!

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