tommy wrote:
FrankDrebin wrote:
tommy wrote:
Nardi wrote:
"Chicago's lowest wind chill was recorded on a horribly cold Christmas Eve in 1983 when a temperature of minus 23 and a 29 mph wind combined to produce the record low wind chill of 82 below zero.
I remember it. I went out to start the car and my eyeballs semi-froze.
I had to deliver papers in the morning (and collect money at night) as a kid and that winter was so damn cold that I'd get ice cream headaches after ten seconds.
It wasn't the windchill that bothered me, though; it was the air temperature. Halfway through my route on December 23rd of that year, I ran home, my face on fire and just too fucking cold to go on. My mom told me to get the hell out of the house and back on the route. When I got home, I learned a few customers called the house, wondering why the paper wasn't there at 6:30 am.
Not long afterwards is when the old America closed up shop. Today, I drive my son to his friend's house two blocks away in the summer.
I got blamed for the missing paper. Thanks fucker.
Man, I probably delivered to y'all haus. You woulda been about four years old, probably all warm and snuggly in your jammy-jams and under like ten blankets while I was out there bringing your parents the
Times and
Trib before school. I hope you appreciated it.
On another note, after I passed the paper route onto my friends, who held on to it for about four weeks, the adults took over. Just about everywhere. And thank goodness for that. Some weird, weird stuff almost happened out there.
I had two routes from age 7 and a half until High school - The Penny Saver and The Star.
Never really saw any "funny stuff", as I was usually sleep-walking/riding while delivering, but, yes, it was cold, and I covered a shitload of ground on my bike. Its crazy how far away from home I would ride in those pre-dawn mornings BEFORE SCHOOL. Holy shit.
The craziest thing, though was "collecting for the PennySaver". See, it was a complimentary paper that you had to go solicit donations for if you wanted to get paid a dime for rolling-up those fucking things, putting any inserts in, rubber banding them, and then sliding them into plastic bags (though I skipped the bags as often as I could) and then delivering them. Most people told me to get fucked, but the ones who did pay helped me to acquire my first payroll purchase by my own hand:
(my first almost two years of earnings went toward replacing a camp counselor's windshield that my brother and I broke at summer day camp by throwing rocks at cars in a parking lot)
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