A Case Of Mistaken Identity

I cannot tell a lie, Father.
It was I who chopped down your cherry tree.
- George Washington (1738)

Today we finally reach the long-anticipated Iowa Caucuses.  For many it will come as a welcome diversion to the coverage of President Trump's impeachment and Senate trial.  In the seven-plus years I have been writing this blog, I have seldom posted anything about my three year sojourn in Iowa, but, this being a kind of National Iowa Day, it seems like an appropriate time to do so.  I have checked the Iowa statute of limitations laws, and I believe I'm good to go.

My family moved to Bettendorf, Iowa, one of the Quad Cities, in the winter of 1961.  We lived in a development comprised of roughly ten townhouses on the northwest edge of town.  Each townhouse had four units.  Therefore, with so many families occupying those dwellings, I figured there would be at least a number of kids my age.  Wrong.  Down the street from us lived the only other teenage boys in the neighborhood: Bud, who was my age, and his brother Kevin, one year older.  We did not attend the same school, but we hung out when we were home.

Kevin had a job delivering the Times-Democrat, the major daily newspaper published in Davenport, the largest of the Quad Cities.  About six weeks after my family arrived, Kevin presented me with what he called a "great opportunity."  His family was going out of town on the following Saturday and would not return home until Sunday evening.  How would I like to make some "easy money" by taking care of his route that Sunday morning?  His route was in a residential neighborhood about a half-mile away, and there would be 50 to 60 houses.  The only downside, according to Kevin, was that I was supposed to start the route at 5:30 a.m.  He conveniently avoided mentioning the bitter cold forecast for that day.  He also failed to mention one other salient fact which bore heavily on the matters at hand.

Although I can't remember the exact monetary compensation involved, this would be way more money than I had ever earned in a single day.  At age 13, I had not had a real job at that point.  As for the early pre-dawn start, I wasn't all that concerned, as I had served as an altar boy for dozens of 6:30 masses in Libertyville not that long ago.  The time of day for the paper route gig did not seem that different.  I told Kevin I would accept his offer.

I was instructed to pick up the papers at a particular corner, the "stack corner," very near the start of the route.  After walking the half-mile from home I arrived at the appointed time, 5:30, and sure enough there were the stacks which the newspaper truck had deposited next to the curb.  The wind chill had to be below zero, and the pitch black night was still two hours before sunrise.  It was all I could do to snag the list of addresses out of my pocket.  Even with gloves on, my fingers were so cold that I had little feeling in them when I tried to hold a pencil to check off the houses as I made the deliveries to their front doors.

I didn't realize how much thicker and heavier the Sunday newspaper was compared to the other days' papers until I started to stuff them in my bag.  The combination of weight and space meant I would have to make several trips back and forth to the stack corner in order to complete my route.  As I was returning to the stack corner after the fourth or fifth round of deliveries, the eastern sky was beginning to display a glint of sun.  "Just one more round," I told myself, "and then I can go back to bed and thaw out."

I expected to find on the corner a small stack of the remaining papers, the last ones needed to finish my route.  Instead, there were two surprises awaiting me.  The first surprise was that instead of just the eight or nine Sunday papers I expected to find, there was a whole other supply of newspapers piled high next to them.  This supply was nearly as copious as the stack which I first saw at 5:30.  To say I was dumbfounded would be an understatement.  But yet, that was only the half of it.

The second surprise was that there was another kid, about my age, who was standing at the stack corner.  I had never seen him before and had no idea what he was doing, other than standing there shivering.  "Are you here to deliver Kevin's papers?" he asked.  I replied that I was.  It wasn't until his next statement that the light bulb went off for me.  "I'm supposed to have 42 Registers here, but the truck only left me 8."  I walked up closer to the paper stacks and could not believe my eyes.  Sitting by the curb were two distinct stacks of newspapers: 56 Times-Democrats and 8 Des Moines Registers.  I had mistakenly spent the last 90 minutes delivering the wrong newspapers!

I am embarrassed to confess that I played dumb, claiming ignorance.  That was not one of my proudest moments. Other than to rationalize that my body was practically frozen solid, I can't, even now more than a half-century later, excuse my denial of any knowledge regarding the missing Registers.  The alternative would have been to retrieve the Registers which I had delivered to Kevin's Times-Democrat customers, maybe even help the other kid deliver the Registers to the correct houses, and then deliver the 56 Times-Democrats to their rightful owners.  The only one of those three things I did was the last.  It was well past 9:00 by the time I finished.

I never saw that poor kid again and don't know how, or even if, the issue of the "missing" Registers was resolved. Kevin never brought it up when he paid me.  I wanted to say to him, "Why didn't' you tell me the Des Moines Registers were going to be dumped on the Times-Democrat stack corner?" but I didn't dare bring up the subject.  Besides, the blame was obviously more mine than Kevin's.  If I had only bothered to look at the top of the newspapers before I started my route, I would have realized the Times-Democrat truck was very late; there would have been no ensuing mixup.  I decided to let well enough -- at least for me -- alone.

According to legend, a day of reckoning arrived for George Washington at the age of six.  A day of reckoning arrived for me at the age of thirteen.  We handled it in two vastly different ways.  One of us went on to become a great war general, a Founding Father, and the first President of the United States.  The other went on to become the Functionary of the Quentin Estates.