Back in the day, I threw papers for the Dallas Times Herald, the city’s afternoon daily. I was 12 years old when I took over a route of about 50 papers. I folded the papers and put them in a canvas bag about twice as big as a beach bag. I walked the blocks, pitching papers. Sometimes I’d ride my bike.
The work involved more than you might think. If you wanted your paper “stopped” for a week, you would tell me that, or tell the Times Herald to tell me that, and I would be the one who carried out the stop on the designated days.
It cost a little less than a dollar a month to subscribe. And I had two kinds of customers: Those who were PIAs—meaning they paid in advance by check to the Times Herald—and those who weren’t. The latter paid me directly. Rarely did I have a delinquent subscriber or, for that matter, a delivery complaint.
I netted $35 to $40 a month in this ancient business. It took me no more than an hour a day to deliver my route. So I made slightly more than a dollar per hour. That was about what the city paid someone to mow and trim its lawns.
I liked to throw long, from the street, and one afternoon I threw a paper too long—and too hard. It made the porch, but it also broke a windowpane. The customer didn’t bless me out, or demand to speak with my parents or my supervisor. She asked only that I do the right thing, which was to have the glass replaced. And so I did. As a (self-) preventive measure, I quit throwing this particular copy and instead began walking it up to the front porch.
The Times Herald had great subscription-sales contests. One year I won a free trip to Houston to see then-number-one Texas play Rice. We stayed in the old Rice Hotel, and the game ended in a tie, 14-14.
I learned a lot, having a paper route. And I was proud to be working for a company that employed someone whose work I admired, the great sportswriter Blackie Sherrod, who died this year at the age of 96.
I was a sports nut (still am) and played sports (passably). In junior high, I started writing about them. So I looked to Blackie’s stories and columns to learn what I could about sportswriting. I fell into the habit of pulling a paper from my daily draw as soon as it arrived and searching for Blackie’s byline. I was annoyed on those rare occasions when Blackie wasn’t in the paper.
Eventually I had to give up my excellent paper route: There was too much else to do—including writing about sports for school publications. Fortunately, my parents started a Times Herald subscription, and that enabled me to keep reading Blackie. Years later my mother still mailed me clippings (today she would provide links) of Blackie’s work; he remained consistently good.
William Forrest Sherrod was born in 1919 and reared on a farm near Belton, in central Texas. He played football at Howard Payne University but gave it up due to injury. After he graduated, he served in the Navy during World War II as a torpedo plane gunner in the Pacific. After the war, he took a job with the Temple Telegram, the first of the four Texas newspapers he wrote for (the others being the Fort Worth Press, the Times Herald, and the Dallas Morning News) before he retired in 2003. He was voted Texas Sportswriter of the Year a record 16 times. He won just about every award he was eligible for.
Many years have passed since I was, for a time, a student of Blackie’s work. I could see that he knew sports and could analyze games as well as anyone. But what made his prose lively and engaging, what inflected it with humor, were the similes and metaphors he conceived so easily, against deadline.
Thus, of Johnny Unitas, the great quarterback for the Baltimore Colts, Blackie wrote, “His face is a map of a hard path, forehead wrinkles, cascading furrows in his cheeks, small pockmarks dotting his lean serious cheeks. He is a day laborer who somehow fell into fame on his way to work and it impresses him not a whit.”
And of sportswriting, it’s “just like driving a taxi. It ain’t the work you enjoy. It’s the people you run into.”
I met Blackie once. I was a high school senior about to apply for admission to a university that gave a full scholarship to the applicant deemed most likely to excel in sportswriting. I wanted a supporting letter from Blackie.
I introduced myself in a letter, he invited me over to his office, I brought some clips, we talked, and he wrote the letter, with a copy to me. I finished third.
Maybe I should have kept my old paper route and saved the money made from it for tuition.
