I know I find this sad because of my job, but I can't help feeling that others might also read it with a twinge of regret:
A young teen riding his bike at dawn reaches into his shoulder bag, grabs a tightly folded newspaper and deftly throws it to the front steps.
It's an image as American as apple pie, but the paperboy has gone the way of the milkman.
Today's papers usually arrive by anonymous drive-and-toss. For reasons including the demise of afternoon papers, a shift to centralized distribution and earlier delivery deadlines, adults in cars now make up 81 percent of the country's newspaper carriers.
That's something I have in common with the people mentioned in the story -- President Truman, John Wayne and Bob Hope, Willie Mays,Tom Brokaw and Warren Buffett -- I had a paper route as a kid, for the same newspaper I now write for. It was the first year our family moved to Fort Wayne. I had lived only in the country, and the newspaper route helped me learn what a city was like and how people lived here. The joke about newspapers used to be that it was the only multillion-dollar enterprise that rested on the shoulders of 12-year-olds. They did a good job for a long time, and their passing, I think, is a larger signal of societal change than the disappearance of the milkman.
