30 years ago, my pregnant wife delivered newspapers with me (the paper for which I was also a sports writer)

Terry looked like this and still helped me deliver papers. What a trooper.
(Photo used with the express permission of Mrs. Terry Tennant.)

It was 1993. Terry and I had been married a little more than a year and she was pregnant with our first child, Elissa. I was about a year and a half into my stint as a full-time sports writer for The News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, and generally loving life.

I've written before about my time at the N-H. I started as a sports clerk a week before college, left for a year to join the Cleveland Plain Dealer while still at John Carroll, then came back full time in November 1991 while still six months away from earning my degree.

My tenure at the paper spanned a combined eight years, during which I covered a wide range of high school, college and professional sports. What's more, while the paper itself was one of the largest suburban dailies in Ohio, the staff was relatively small and we all had to do double duty.

That meant nights when I would travel somewhere to cover a game, come back to the office and write my story, then grab a few pages from the next day's sports section to lay out before our midnight deadline.

It was an exhilarating way to make a living for a young newlywed, coming as it did at a time when people actually read newspapers.

The job didn't exactly pay well, so I looked for extra sources of income wherever I could. One of my side jobs was as a carrier for the same newspaper where I was employed.

For eight months or so, I delivered The News-Herald every day to residents of East 300th Street, Lincoln Road and Arlington Circle in my hometown of Wickliffe (we lived on 300th, so it was all very convenient).

On Sundays, I would load the extra-large papers into our car and Terry would drive the route while I walked and delivered to each of my customers. She would get out and deliver papers herself to the few businesses on my route, including the Wickliffe Public Library.

I will never forget the image of a very, very pregnant Terry in the middle of winter 1994 trudging through the snow in her long parka to leave a paper near the library's front door.

I will also never forget Mrs. Piacente, one of my customers on Lincoln. Many Saturday mornings she would greet me just as I was opening her side door to deposit a paper and ask me what articles I had in that day's edition. She also asked me to do a few odd jobs for her, including changing the batteries in her kitchen clock and knocking icicles off her gutters.

I was always happy to help, but the whole thing made me laugh. It was full-service journalism and then some! (And hey, she tipped well.)

Elissa was born in March 1994, and a month later The News-Herald switched from afternoon to morning delivery. That was when I had to give up the route.

I stayed with the paper another 2 1/2 years as a sports writer before moving on to technical writing and eventually corporate communications.

But if there was ever a time when I built a work ethic, it was back in those days when I would work in the newsroom until 2 in the morning, go home and sleep, and be up again mid-morning the next day to deliver my papers.

To be young again.

I remember delivering papers at 3 in the morning and people's front doors were wide open

When I had a News-Herald paper route back in the Paleolithic Age (1981-83), the Saturday morning papers were sometimes delivered to my house obscenely early. Like, to the point that it was still basically Friday night when they were dropped off at the bottom of our driveway.

When that happened, I would occasionally just stay up late and deliver the papers in the middle of the night so that I could sleep until noon the next day.

This was always an adventure because, really, it's not often you're roaming the neighborhood in the dead of night at 12 years old. So it was kind of fun.

Anyway, when I did this in the summer, it was not at all uncommon for me to open someone's door and toss the paper into their wide-open, not-at-all-protected house. Only a screen door separated their living room from the outside, which was presumably to allow cooler air to circulate through their house during the night in the age before central air was common.

I could easily have walked in and taken whatever I wanted.

Not that I ever did that or even thought about doing that. The point was, many people felt just fine sleeping while leaving their house entirely unsecure.

This would not happen today. People like to say society was safer back then, but I'm not so sure. I think there was just a greater illusion of safety, and people for the most part got really lucky they didn't get robbed more often.

Nowadays, if I purposely left the front door open all night long in order to cool down our house, Terry would kill me.

Even if I did it accidentally, she also would likely kill me.

I would rather deal with a burglar than an enraged wife, if I'm being honest.

When I was a paper boy...

The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently announced that it is going to cut home delivery of the newspaper back to three days a week beginning this summer. The paper will still publish every day, but you'll only be able to get it delivered to your front door three times a week.

Actually, "delivered to your front door" is a phrase that probably dates me. Of the relatively few people who still receive a newspaper at home, even fewer actually get it placed in or even near their front door. Most of the time, it's thrown into your driveway or placed in a newspaper tube in front of your house.

Another highly visible change is in the people who still deliver newspapers. When I was growing up, those people were almost always kids with paper bags slung over their shoulders. Nowadays, they're almost always adults driving cars.

I understand the economics of this. Newspapers, which are running on razor-thin profit margins, are better served giving larger routes (i.e., hundreds of customers) to adults than smaller routes (i.e., dozens of customers) to kids.

But that doesn't mean I don't miss the prototypical paper boy/girl. I was one myself.

Back in the early 80s, I delivered The Lake County News-Herald to 40 or so customers in my Wickliffe neighborhood. I had the brown and orange News-Herald paper bag, and every day I would make sure those customers received the news of the world.

This is back when people actually got their news from print newspapers, of course, and not from phones, tablets, iPods, etc.

I never minded delivering the papers. That part was actually kind of fun. It was the collecting I hated. Every two weeks you had to walk around to your customers' houses and hound them to pay you. And for some people, you really did have to hound them.

The good part about collecting, though, was that was obviously how you made your money. The lady from the newspaper would come around every two weeks to take the money and leave me with $30 or $40 profit, which I would use at arcades and to buy video game cartridges for my Atari 2600 system. In retrospect, I probably should have saved some of that cash...

I gave up my paper route in 7th grade once I started getting into more extracurricular activities at school. But I returned to the delivery business several years later as a 24-year-old adult.

By that point in my life, I was a full-time sports writer for The News-Herald. We didn't have any kids yet and we needed the extra money, so I took on a paper route. Again, didn't mind the delivering, but the collecting was less than fun.

I only kept that route for about six months, then dropped it once Elissa was born. But two memories stand out in my mind from the experience:

(1) It was fun doing full-service journalism. I would write articles for the paper, edit copy, help lay it out, etc., then get up the next day to actually deliver it, too. How often do you see that in anything other than a really small town?

(2) Mrs. Piacente, one of my customers, would always wait for me to show up with the paper on Saturday mornings. When I got to her house, she would ask what page my weekly Bowling Notes column was on so she could read it (she was a big bowler, that Mrs. Piacente). She would also occasionally ask me to do little odd jobs for her, including knocking the icicles off her house and changing the batteries in her kitchen clock. These were clearly tasks that fell under the "other duties as assigned" section of the paper boy job description.

And now the slow, painful death of newspapers is upon us. The three-day-a-week-home-delivery model, or other scenarios like it, will become increasingly prevalent. And eventually the print newspaper will die out in favor of e-news.

Which I'm actually fine with. But I'll always miss the feel and smell of newsprint. Newspapers have been a part of my life for decades, and they never really go out of your blood.

As long as we're being nostalgic here, may I suggest you watch the following video of a song written by a favorite artist of mine named David Francey? It documents his experiences as a paper boy back in his native Scotland. It's a tune I almost could have written myself. Enjoy: