A generation of workers is disappearing under our noses in the atmosphere of digital advances and paperless routes.
Over 180 years ago, the tradition of delivering newspapers to someone’s doorsteps or on street corners started with one news outlet in New York City.
On Sept. 4, 1833, Benjamin Day, The Sun publisher, hired Barney Flaherty, making him the first newspaper carrier or newsboy or paperboy in the world. Day published an advertisement for newspaper delivery men.
Ten-year-old Flaherty applied although he knew he was under-qualified. The job opening was looking for “steady men,” and not pint-sized boys.
His guts caught the attention of Day who hired the boy for this brand new job. The only skill required, perhaps aside from a strong voice, was the ability to throw a rolled newspaper into the bushes of a homeowner’s yard.
Flaherty did an excellent job selling The Sun in street corners, too. Not long after that boys and girls made a beeline for news outlets to apply for the job.
There is sketchy information that the newsboy job in the Philippines started in the 1969s. I do not have the time to verify this as of now, but it is a handy timeline.
In just 65 years, this type of work is dying along with other jobs that are extinct or struggling to survive such as linotype operator, shoeshine, ice cutter, knife and scissors grinder (a handful still exist), switchboard operator and lamplighter.
In my village, there is an elderly man who hawks newspapers. Maybe he is the last man standing in his generation as a newspaper carrier.
By the way, Sept. 4 is National Newspaper Carrier Day. Progress is necessary. In its wake are jobs that mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence have replaced with little emotion.
A generation is passing. I do not want the eventual demise of newspaper carrier work to go like mist that evaporates when the sunshine of advancement in technology reigns supreme.
I want this tiny column to be a tomb marker for those old and useless jobs that have actually brought us where we are now.
Before I end, 1960 was the year the first newsboy job emerged in the Philippines, and was also the year the Newspaper Carrier Hall of Fame was created in the US.
I admire this memorial to the little ones, the newspaper carriers, some of whom have become big names in our world: Thomas Edison, Tom Cruise, Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Disney and John Wayne.