BEYOND WINTER [R, 5-2-24]

[I think I posted this here before, but I just came across this version in an
old journal.]

THE LADY IN RED

 

A newspaper girl in the 1940s was an odd sight.  I watched for her. When she came on to our street, Oakland Ave, at the New York Ave. end, I would meet her. She would give me the papers for my side of the street. Then we went down the street together, she delivering on the other side, I delivering on the side where I lived. When we got to the end of the block, at Washington Street, her route was over. Sometimes the circulation manager miscounted and gave her the wrong number of papers. She would have a paper or two left. She gave them to me as payment for helping her deliver.

I would cross Washington Street to the Mallory manufacturing plant and stand at the gate as the workers streamed out at the end of the day shift. I was too shy and frightened to call out “Newspapers for sale,” or even hold one aloft. I just waited and hoped someone would notice me and offer to buy a paper.

An office lady in a red coat did. She didn’t say anything, just handed me a nickel and took my only copy of  “The Indianapolis News,” the evening competitor of “The Indianapolis Star.” If I had only one paper on a particular evening, I would hide it behind my back until I saw her coming, so that no one else could buy it.

“The Star” had several boys who stood at the Mallory gates and shouted out the availability of their papers. Lesser people than the lady in the red coat bought them.

Once, as I stood there with my lone paper, the “Star” boys came to me as a group and told me that their boss, who was standing back on the sidewalk, by his van, watching, said it was illegal for me to stand there and I had to leave. I was scared, but I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t leave. I was not going to disappoint the lady in the red coat. The boys realized they were losing sales while they were trying to run me off so went back to their huckstering.

On days when the papers came out right for the route, and there were no extras, I felt bad. The lady in the red coat would get no paper.

In a cold and dark winter, the one when I turned ten but no one remembered my birthday, it was a relationship I counted on.

John Robert McFarland