mitch_waldow's Blog

Last month at the L.A. Press Club I attended a gathering of former employees of the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.  The purpose was to mark the near-20th anniversary of the paper's final edition.  Most of the ex-Her-Ex ex-patriots worked there in the 1970s and '80s.  They were reporters, editors, columnists and pressmen.  I worked for the Herald long before most of them got there.  And yet I'm younger than most of them.  How could this be?  Here's how: I was in distribution.  I was a newsboy.

I didn't deliver Herald-Examiners house-to-house on a bicycle.  I stood on street corners and hawked them car-to-car.  In L.A.'s MacArthur Park there's a statue of a newsboy.  It's a sculpture by Italian artist Paolo Troubetzkoy, and it dates to 1920.  Aside from the subject's knickers and cap, that bronze figure pretty much is what a newsboy looked like when I sold papers on the street.  I'd stand on the corner with a dozen papers under one arm,and with the other extended, I'd hold the latest edition for all to see.  I wore an apron change bag (which I still have) and a coin changer tucked under my belt.

Until the 1960s paper vendors were common sights on busy street corners in L.A.  The Herald often used kids to sell its afternoon editions on the streets.  We were "independent contractors" and got to keep three cents for every dime paper that we sold.  Sometimes I'd make as much as two dollars in an afternoon.  Not bad money for a kid.

The paper corners  were at heavily-travelled intersections.  In the three years that I hawked Heralds I had four West L.A. corners.  Some were better than others.  Like they say, "location, location, location."  My worst corner caught drivers on their way home to more affluent  parts of town.  Most of these people did not read the Herald, which was a Hearst paper known for its screaming headlines and arch-conservative editorial slant.  At my best corners, I sold to customers who did not read the Herald for its rhetoric, but instead for its race results.   I figured that most of these bettors rarely won, because I almost never got tipped.  Yet one of my pedestrian customers tipped every day, but not with money.  This guy was a comedian who used to work in burlesque.  Each day when he bought a paper he'd tell me a dirty joke.  I still remember some of them, but I won't relate them here.

At one of my corners there was a music school nearby.  It was a small school.  A fellow gave piano lessons.  He was a big man, and I'd see him a few times a week as he walked to the corner drugstore.    He never spoke to me, though, and he seemed very stern.  As a kid I had a habit of whistling, and I used to whistle a lot while I was selling papers.  I guess I was a top 40 nuisance, because one day this piano teacher  walked over to me -- I thought he finally was going to say hello -- and said, "If you don't cut out that  whistling I'm going to break your neck."

My tenure as a Herald-Examiner newsboy ended on afternoon in December, 1967, when the paper's employees went on strike.  Although I was not technically an employee, there was a lockout which affected all of the distributors.  And that pretty much marked the end of adolescent newsboys on L.A. streets.  Whenever I drive by MacArthur Park and see that old statue I wonder if there would be more newspaper readers today if kids still sold them on corners.