Being obsessed with guitars and music in general by the age of twelve, I needed some form of income. There were two ways for a kid my age to make money. Get a paper route or become a caddy at the Red Run Golf Course. I chose a Detroit News route. I subbed for a kid on vacation who never came back. My route consisted of a large apartment complex with multi-unit buildings and individual units that were connected together, part of a busy street and two quiet streets. Papers were picked up in a little dark room in the rear of the G&P Market. My Dad and I found a Red Schwinn Heavy-Duty Bicycle in the Tradin' Times newspaper for $60. There was a broken weld on one part of the frame that Dad said Tommy Adams could fix. Tommy Adams was a little guy that worked on Corvettes. He looked like he would have made a great jockey. My Dad told me that because he was so small, that he was the perfect Corvette mechanic.
Tommy welded the frame with great skill while I played with his bulldog and Dad looked on. This was going to be some bike. It had 105 gauge spokes. It was made for a paper route. Dad bought original Schwinn replacement parts, primer, black spray paint and even decals at Powers Bike Shop on Washington Avenue. He sanded it, sprayed it with primer then sprayed several coats of the black. Sanding between each coat. Very professional. When everything was finished, we put it together and it looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line.
I delivered The Detroit News everyday. Monday and Tuesday were light days. Thin papers. Wednesday was a big paper with two sections that had to be put together at the paper station. Thursday, Friday and Saturday were normal sized papers. Sunday was huge and easily the worst day of the week. Some customers received the paper every day. That was $1.20 per week. Some people only wanted the paper on Sunday and that was $.50 per week. You needed to collect from each customer every week. Each carrier had a little book in which we kept track of our collections. Collecting could start on Thursday. The bill needed to be paid on Saturday morning at the station. If you paid it on Sunday, the manager, Mr. Budrey would get angry.
The main reason for this route as far as I was concerned was to raise cash for records. The Wholesale Record Outlet was only a mile from the house and I went all the time. Everyone that worked there knew me by name and I knew them by theirs. There was Ed, Mae, Dianne and Steve. I bought lots of records. This is where I got my first Jeff Beck, Hendrix, Cream and Deep Purple records. The list could go on and on.
After about six months of delivering The Detroit News,I learned that if I really needed cash for some great record, I could collect from a few customers on Wednesday and get what I needed. Eventually,I would even collect from some customers as early as Tuesday. Some paid without any questions. I told The ones that wondered why I was collecting so early that my family was leaving town for the weekend and I needed to get a jump on things. They believed me.
Then,one day a fairly new customer who I hardly ever saw approached me and said "hey, I'm almost always gone and I want to pay up through the next eight months. Is that O.K.?" I told him that I thought it was a great idea. He gave me about $40. I went straight to The Wholesale Record Outlet and spent all of it on Django Reinhardt albums. He recorded a lot of material and I wanted all of it. I was in heaven and listened to him non-stop.
Tragedy struck about two months later when some couple who lived in the complex but were not customers informed me that this guy who paid me for eight months had MOVED!
He had asked them to talk to me about getting the money I now owed him. I told them whatever I had to to keep them at bay for a while. And I told them something new and different each time they asked me. After a while, they got kind of pricky. And I already had an attitude about them because they were not customers of mine. What were they doing trying to get money from me? And on top of that, they just seemed weird.
Finally, quite a while later(like a year or more)this guy who wanted his money found out who I was and he went to see my Mom about it. I wasn't home. But she paid him the balance. She was only a little upset with me, but thought the guy was a total dork.
He kept telling her "I could have his job!" As a thirteen year old kid, I didn't understand exactly what he meant by this. I wondered how if he was already gone all the time, he going to keep up with doing my route. Was he going to want my bike too? Tommy Adams and my Dad would really be disappointed with me. They had worked so hard on it.
This story concludes twelve years later in the Meijers Thrifty Acres parking lot in Royal Oak, Michigan. As Teresa(my wife at the time) and I walked toward the store entrance, I noticed this guy with a woman. It's the guy. I don't know why I recognized him. I just did. I asked him if he had ever lived in the Rochester apartments and he said "yeah, a really long time ago". I reminded him of the whole incident and he acted like he barely remembered. That's old age for you. Or maybe just embarrassment.
