Plastic bags with the morning paper are optional.
To avoid the plastic bags that come with our newspaper subscription, we are getting a Star Tribune newspaper tube. It’s such an easy solution for something that has been bugging me a long time. It just took a phone call to the Strib (612) 673-4343.
We haven’t received the paper tube yet, but I’ve been assured that we will soon.
When I was a kid in Rapid City, I had a paper route . It was a hand-me-down from my brother when he landed a “real” job at Happy Joe’s Pizza & Ice Cream Parlor – where I would eventually follow him too. Matt made pizzas and I served them, scooped ice cream and sang Happy Birthday to whomever claimed to have one that day.
We never used to put the newspapers in plastic bags, although for one route – The Plainsman on Ellsworth Air Force Base – we’d roll them up and secure them with a rubber band. So, it was our job – my younger sister’s and mine – to help roll papers after school on Thursdays. Mom helped too. I probably didn’t appreciate it at the time, but she was gently ensuring a boy’s success while teaching all of us the value of doing a good job and making light work with many hands. In addition to making our hands and faces black with ink, rolling the papers made them easier to fling onto the porches that lined the Skyline neighborhood, dilapidated housing for one-stripers compared to the luxurious Shell housing where we lived just past a park surrounded by a chain link fence with it’s well worn system of access points where a kid could slip underneath to take a shortcut to a skating rink.
Shell and Skyline were long ago demolished.
Good news! For the past couple of days our carrier has been giving us our paper without the plastic. We still do not have a newspaper tube yet, but as long as we’re not getting the plastic, I can live with the delay.