Gone are the days, but Bergen's grown up paperboys (and girls) remember their deliveries with fondness

It was a simpler time. Neighbors were not strangers. Kids biked around town. But, times changed and, with them, paperboys (and girls) vanished from Bergen's landscape.
For sure, the largest factor in their disappearance was a business decision out of the carriers' control: The Record moved from afternoon delivery by youth carriers to a morning paper on Sept. 12, 1988. The 6 a.m. delivery deadline simply required too early a wake-up before the start of school.

But other issues were at play, too. Recruiting and retaining youth carriers became harder as parents feared road rage and crime against their children, especially on collection days when they had money in their pocket. Also, as Bergen became wealthier, money, at least in some cases, could be found in easier ways – from one's own parents.

Finally, wanting to avoid its trucks driving around suburban towns at 4 in the morning to drop off the bundles of papers at carriers' homes, The Record opted for a quieter solution. Carriers would instead pick up their papers at distribution centers scattered throughout the more industrial areas of the county. As a result, having a car became a requirement, and adult carriers became the norm.

Paperboys and girls have taken their rightful place in Bergen's nostalgic history. As this extensive roster of former carriers shows, being a youth carrier, perhaps due to the work ethic it instilled, was the start of a successful professional life.

Local Relations

Bob Sommer remembers the cards: those rectangular cut-outs of thick yellow cardboard, connected by a metal ring and used to track payments. Sommer's cards numbered close to four dozen, one for each home on his Hillsdale route. The bookkeeping system worked as long he held that ring tightly.

Then one rainy Saturday, the collection day, somewhere along the way, the cards slipped from his grasp. "I spent all day looking for them, and I found them in the road, gnarled and messy," he says. "I was just so happy to get them back. For a 13- to 14-year-old kid, it was a lot of responsibility."

Today, Sommer carries considerably greater responsibility, as executive vice president of the MWW Group, the East Rutherford public relations firm that handles such major corporations as McDonald's, Amazon, Continental Airlines and Verizon.

"My father was a CPA, and he told me I had to make allowances for bad debt, but no one ever stiffed me, and everybody tipped something," says Sommer. "Today, when not every client pays all the time, I get a flashback to those yellow cards."

Foul Weather Friend

When the going got tough, Jillian Armenante was there. Growing up in western Bergen in the early 1970s, Jillian helped her older brother, Bruce, with his paper route when inclement weather kept him off his bicycle. Sitting in back of the family station wagon while her father drove, Jillian would assemble and fold The Record's sections so that Bruce could fling the papers onto customers' porches.

"It would invariably be 28 degrees and miserable," says Armenante, now a Los Angeles-based actor best known for her role as Donna on CBS' Judging Amy. "Occasionally, I got to throw, but if my throw was lousy, I was relegated to folding again."

Young Jillian created what Bruce deemed the "tri-fold lock," a tight assembly that enabled the paper to arc through the air and hit a porch many yards away without coming undone. Her throwing arm soon improved enough for the local softball league, a fair consolation considering that she wasn't compensated for her contribution. "My brother?" Armenante laughs. "Share tips?"

Calling 'Foul'on Fee Dodgers

Lawrence Frank has a habit of hanging out with the bigger guys, whether it was as a Record carrier in Teaneck, following in the footsteps of his older brothers, or in his current role as the head coach of the New Jersey Nets.

"I was really small, and I was intimidated when people said they paid me when they actually had not," says Frank, now 35 and the youngest head coach in the NBA. "My father set up a spreadsheet. I'd show it to the people who hadn't paid me, and they'd say 'Uh oh.' "

Being tough on collections certainly helped out later in life. A basketball devotee from childhood, Lawrence used his earnings to buy a $550 VHS recorder so he could tape all the major games.

Commanding respect did mean being tough when necessary. "People who accuse me of playing favorites are rebutted all the way back," notes the 5-foot-8-inch Frank. "I turned my mother in for not paying," he laughs.

Bookends to a Simpler Time

Kids growing up in the 1960s saw many changes occurring in the world, but delivering the paper stayed largely the same. For Bob and Paul Fader, brothers 16 years apart, riding a bike and hoping for good tips from customers in their New Milford neighborhood along the Hackensack River offered consistency and simplicity in a tumultuous time.

"I delivered to the New Bridge Inn, where you had all the intellectuals from Fairleigh Dickinson having beers, and they'd ask for an extra paper," remembers Bob, the oldest of six Fader siblings and a real estate appraiser living in Hackensack. "The bartender would tip 50 cents, which was a big deal."

Paul, the baby of the family, pedaled his banana seat Sting-Ray along roads that were just paved when he started out as a Record carrier.

Yet the route still presented a significant hurdle: A huge dog guarded one isolated home on Steuben Avenue, making it difficult for young Paul to collect subscription money from the homeowner. Though he could place the paper in a box at the foot of the long driveway each day, he did not summon the courage to face the animal until he had no choice.

"On the very last day of my route, I somehow got past the dog and told the guy he owed me $52.25 for several years' worth of payments. He started yelling at me and told me it was too much. He gave me $40 and said 'Get out of here, kid.' " Today, Paul would likely negotiate for more: He's chief counsel for acting Gov. Richard Codey.

Law and Order

The acting deputy chief of the Englewood police department, John Banta's many duties include enforcing the drinking age in his native city's watering holes. But when the opportunity arose nearly four decades ago for the then 11-year-old to act beyond his years, he seized it. "My brother was three years older, and he'd just made the football team," Banta notes. "I'd already had substituted for him when he was out of town, so it was natural for me to take over for him even though I was really underage."

The Record route required precise organizational skills as it grew to about 50 homes – including a large garden apartment complex he navigated on his beat-up bicycle. One resident, an elderly and infirm woman, presented a particular challenge. "I had to throw the paper in through her second-floor window because she couldn't make it downstairs," Banta remembers. "If it was a windy day, sometimes I had to give it a second or third try."

Perhaps his positive experience with Englewood's finest was a foreshadowing: When the young Banta sustained cuts and bruises after flipping his paper-laden bike on an uneven sidewalk, a man in blue came to the rescue. "A local officer stopped by and opened up his first aid kit, and patched me up right there," says Banta. "I really appreciated that."

Schooled in Responsibility

Elizabeth Dennis' goal has always been education. Dennis, whose maiden name is Moultrie, used her earnings as as a Suburbanite carrier in her native Englewood in the late 1970s and as a Record carrier for one summer, for boarding school tuition. Currently, Dennis is an English teacher at Dwight Morrow High Schoool.

"It was the start of accountability outside the home," she says. "I remember that people warned me they'd complain when they didn't get their paper when it was snowing, and they surely did."

Today, Dennis, a mother of four, laments that the current crop of teenagers isn't as enterprising as in the proverbial good old days. "The same kids that used to deliver the paper would come knocking on doors when it snowed, asking to shovel," says Dennis. "Now I have to call them first, and maybe they'll do it."

Embracing Change

For Stephen Marino, change, in the form of dimes, nickels and pennies, is a good thing. As a Record carrier during the mid-1950s in his native Bergenfield, Marino worked feverishly to undercut the competition, stealing customers from a company that offered the same newspaper delivery at 3 cents above the paper's direct rate.

Marino's most vivid memory is of the customer who inadvertently paid him with a rare dime. "It was double-stamped in error. The coin went through the press twice," he says. "I brought it to my father, but he did not think that it was worth a lot. I sold it and came home with 40 bucks. He was impressed."

That was a lot of coin, but for Marino, there was more change to be had. Since 1990, he has owned the Corner Square Coin & Stamp Store in his hometown.

An Oath to Serve

William Semanczuk did not take an oath for his first job, delivering papers, as he did for his current position, an anesthesiologist at Hackensack University Medical Center, but he might as well have. The teenage Semanczuk was as serious and dedicated during his stint as a Record paperboy in Elmwood Park in the mid-1980s as he is today when helping to save lives.

"Rain or shine, I always have to be there for the patients. I've never called in sick," says Semanczuk, 36. "And with the paper, I always got it out to everybody. If it got wet, they called me, and I'd get them another one."

Like many of his paperboy pals in the neighborhood at the time, the Bergen Catholic High School student saved his earnings and tips – including the biggest, a $10 bill one Christmas – for a car. His choice? A coveted blue Camaro.

Art of the Deal

The business acumen Joseph Basralian uses as a partner in the Hackensack law firm of Winnie, Banta, Hetherington, Basralian & Kahn might be traced back to his days as a paperboy in Hasbrouck Heights. Now specializing in corporate transactions, Basralian originally learned how to close a deal when selling The Record to new customers. His success at generating new subscriptions earned the middle schooler a series of prizes including a trip to Atlantic City on a charter plane with other top carriers.

The route around the neighborhood was made atop his brother's bicycle, the standard mode of delivery. In the Eisenhower administration, Basralian notes, becoming a paperboy was a budding entrepreneur's best chance to squirrel away cash year-round: "The only way you could raise money when you were a little kid was cutting grass or shoveling snow, but delivering papers was the only constant."

With his first earnings, he replaced the old bike with a coveted Phillips English racer. Today, the midnight blue racing bike is in "a great junk yard in the sky," laughs Basralian, now of Franklin Lakes. But fond memories remain.

Harmony Lessons

As an award-winning songwriter, Gordon Chambers is a busy man. As a teenager in Teaneck during the early 1980s, he was just as industrious. There was school, naturally, but Gordon took a heavier load than most, enabling him to graduate at 16. And then there were his Record routes – three of them, at one point. "I did it because I wanted to be independent. I wanted a sense of my own financial life," explains Chambers, who has penned scores of notable songs, including a 1995 Grammy winner for Anita Baker, "I Apologize," and a soundtrack tune for the Spike Lee film Clockers. He has also picked up the microphone himself, recording with Patti LaBelle and others.

"In the music business, you deal with rejection all the time," Chambers says. "It's just like when you came to collect for subscriptions and people wouldn't answer the door." The young Chambers wondered if racism was behind those closed doors, but says he "learned not to take things personally."

The multiculturalism of his customer base was an excellent education. Chambers adds: "It was interesting to see how Jewish and Muslim people would prepare for the holidays. Sometimes I used to smell all the different aromas in the houses, and people would offer me a bite."

Chambers also learned how to balance the responsibilities of being a carrier with the typical teenage desires. MTV had just become available in Teaneck when he was delivering papers. Despite his excitement for the new music video phenomenon, Chambers had to break away to do his job. "Having a paper route was really like being a kid and an adult at the same time."

Prime Real Estate

Even back in the 1970s, Fort Lee was where Record carriers knew that newsprint translated into greenbacks. The high-rise buildings allowed for quick deliveries without exposure to the outside elements. Those desirable routes gave teens like Jay Foreman good reason to keep tabs on carriers planning to leave their jobs.

"Kids traded things for the privilege of delivering in Fort Lee," remembers Foreman, currently a toy company executive in Florida. "And the more you hustled, the more you could make." Customers of the teenage hustler included Frankie Valli of The Four Seasons and Yankee Bobby Murcer.

Foreman's company, Play Along Toys, buys licenses for perennial favorites like Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids, products developed by other toy manufacturers. "We brought these brands back and freshened them up for the next generation of kids," he says, revealing a skill no doubt honed in his earlier days tackling the challenge of readers who'd let their subscriptions lapse. "A lot of times, people withdrew their subscription because they were falling behind on their payment. To try to reel them back in, we'd get extra papers and leave them on their doors with notes. Every now and then, people would hear you come down the halls on your route. They'd peek their heads out the door and ask to get back on board."

Learning Outside the Classroom

Roberta Kenyon is still a year shy of 30, but the second-grade teacher at Oradell Public School becomes melancholy when reflecting on the changes wrought in the world since her days as a Record carrier in her native Bergenfield.

"It's sad you don't have that personal connection anymore," says Kenyon, whose maiden name is Jacobs. "Your paper just ends up on your lawn. You don't know who's bringing it, you just know that it's somebody in a car. There's no name, no face."

Roberta's route, which she walked, covered close to 100 homes in just a few blocks. Her earnings financed her first car and a good part of her college education. But her days sliding newspapers inside neighbors' screen doors were ending: Kenyon was one of the last youth carriers. "You needed a car at that point, so now I had to get my parents to do my papers with me, and to me, it wasn't my job anymore," Kenyon concludes.

Monday Morning Quarterback

Bergen's own hero Phil Simms is the Giants all-time leader in passing, but a much earlier throwing experience happened far from the gridiron. Growing up in blue-collar Louisville, Ky., young Simms was one of eight siblings who all had paper routes.

For close to a decade beginning in the early 1960s, the future quarterback delivered The Courier-Journal in the mornings; when he wasn't playing sports, he also delivered the now-defunct Louisville Times in the afternoon. "I remember being in second grade, getting up at 5 a.m.," says Simms, now of Franklin Lakes. "That was torture. The first time I ever slept in, until 7 a.m., was when I was a junior in high school."    

The money was good – Simms remembers making $20 a week. But collecting was tough. Between that process and doing the Sunday newspaper inserts, being a paperboy consumed his entire Saturday. Tossing the pigskin was not an option; playing defense, of sorts, was.

"The other part I remember was the dogs running around," Simms adds. "The houses couldn't have been more than 10 feet apart, and no one would fence in their dogs or have them on leashes. So if you're 8 years old and some big old dog is woofing at you, it could be scary." Simms' brother Dominick guarded his back when it came to the canines.

"To this day, everyone in my family still talks about growing up as paper boys. It's something I'll never forget," Simms says.

Eternal Youth

Being a Record paperboy enabled young Andy Gatto to buy some of the playthings he admired through store windows. His parents, Italian immigrants, encouraged the 11-year-old to take the job. His father even helped with the weighty Sunday papers, loaded into the family Packard for delivery across their Fort Lee-Cliffside Park neighborhood.

"Being a paperboy went to the whole notion of a work ethic," says Gatto, today CEO of Oakland-based toymaker Russ Berrie. "In this case, working was primarily for the little luxuries that a kid would want. My parents thought this country was a wonderful place where anyone, even a kid, could earn a few bucks."

Some of those bucks came from a figure that made his money in a less wholesome way. Gatto delivered The Bergen Evening Record to Mafia boss Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia at his Fort Lee mansion. Anastasia was, Gatto notes, "a very good tipper." After the mobster was gunned down in a Manhattan barbershop in 1957, the industrious teenager rang the bell of the estate's new owner, comedian Buddy Hackett, who liked the location for its proximity to the Catskills' hotels where he performed. Gatto got Hackett to subscribe too, providing the cash for a few more toys.

Carrying History

Earning top-paperboy honors in the late 1960s meant a few nice perks for Tom Toronto, but it also provided a valuable learning experience.

The Hasbrouck Heights preteen was thrilled when success at his neighborhood route garnered him a Record windbreaker and complimentary trip to a basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden. To Toronto, today president of United Way of Bergen County, getting invited to the paper's Hackensack offices to meet the owners was just gravy.

"It turned out to be really cool," says Toronto, recalling that the late Greg Borg, brother of current Record owner Malcolm Borg, told the assembled youngsters they were "the linchpin of democracy."

And when two pillars of democracy fell,  Toronto became even more motivated to deliver daily updates to an anxious public. "I remember distinctly delivering through the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK," says Toronto. "People were home  in the afternoon. A lot of people were working night shifts, women weren't in the workplace. So they were waiting for their paper. You really felt you were a part of something."

Earning tactics

The young Peter Pace shouldered a bag of papers every day as a 10-year-old Record carrier in his native Teaneck during the mid-1950s. Today, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and four-star general is still dealing with weighty issues, but now he is making, rather than just delivering, the news.

And the young Pace's wages? The money wasn't negotiable, and reconnaissance was occasionally necessary in order to collect. His base salary was 33 cents a week – the tips, of course, depended on his neighbors' generosity. "If somebody gave me a buck and told me to keep the change, it was a big deal," he says.

Extracurricular activities

Willie Reale brings after-school fun to youngsters with his children's theater workshops. But long before he began a career in dramatic arts, he was spending his own twilight hours delivering The Record near his Park Ridge neighborhood during the early 1970s.

Today, Reale is best known as founder of The 52nd Street Project, a nonprofit joining professional directors with inner-city kids to produce plays. The MacArthur Foundation awarded him a 1994 "genius grant" for his work, and he was nominated for two Tony awards in 2003 for the children's stage production A Year With Frog and Toad, on which he collaborated with his brother, noted composer Robert Reale. But Willie Reale's audience isn't limited to the playground set – he has also written for several prime time television series including the NBC drama Homicide: Life on the Street.

Curbside Enthusiasm

Comic Richard Lewis has made a career of playing the malcontent. He surely knows from whence he speaks: At his first job, as a Record paperboy in his native Englewood, he undoubtedly encountered the cranky customer whose paper was late, wet or improperly placed as he proceeded along his route.

Prior to his current gig as a regular on Larry David's HBO show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lewis was a character actor in numerous Hollywood films, and starred with Jamie Lee Curtis in the early-1990s ABC series Anything But Love. He continues to do standup and make guest appearances on network TV.

No delivery malfunction

In Bergenfield, back in the late-1970s, Wayne Scot Lukas earned his first dollars to buy the hottest clothing and LPs by taking a Record paper route. He later moved to dressing windows at Riverside Square Mall, Hackensack. Today, Lukas, one of the best-known celebrity fashion stylists, counts Janet Jackson, Halle Berry and Meryl Streep among his clients.

Though perhaps most noted for outfitting Jackson in the infamous gladiator outfit she wore to Super Bowl XXXVIII, Lukas dresses top models and performers for album covers, photo shoots and music videos. His work has also been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As for Jackson's halftime debacle, Lukas places responsibility on her co-performer, Justin Timberlake. Delivering the paper was never this complicated.

Recipe for Success

As one of 10 children in his Rutherford family, Tim Keating knew there wasn't a lot of extra change to go around. Delivering The Record was a logical solution, but the two-wheeler necessary to carry the goods in his steeply pitched Jackson Avenue territory wasn't up to par. "We had these jalopy bikes. Mine was a three speed, stuck in third speed," says Keating, who recently left his job as the executive chef at Quattro at The Four Seasons in Houston. "So it was a logistical issue. I had to get the papers dropped off halfway up the hill, and then I had to trudge up the hill to retrieve them."

Keating's earnings, plus money his siblings made at other jobs, were thrown into the pot for an occasional treat, or the proverbial rainy day. Real rainy days were a more immediate problem: It was the early '70s, and carriers still had to lobby for plastic bags to keep the papers dry, Keating remembers. Customers appreciated the service, rewarding Keating with what tips they could muster – a lesson he heeds in his restaurant career.

Keating, who was nominated for the James Beard Award for the Southeast region four years in a row, plans to open a new eatery he hopes  will best his prior accomplishments. The importance of hard work was certainly ingrained early. "All of the kids in the neighborhood had routes, but this one kid who had the largest one – nobody could touch him," he says. "He was a legend. His route actually encompassed my neighborhood, so I had to go 3, 4 miles just to reach my route."

Mixed Media

Decades before Arthur Godfrey brought his entertaining vision to millions of early TV viewers in postwar America, he worked in an older medium, bringing the evening news to his Hasbrouck Heights neighbors.

Godfrey told The Bergen Evening Record in a 1954 interview that, prior to World War I,  he had been a paperboy for the publication from 1910 to 1914. Schoolboy chums at the time reported that the freckle-faced youngster was often seen with the newspaper in one hand, an open Latin book in the other.

After an illustrious career that began in radio in 1945, the beloved talent scout, host of CBS's primetime Arthur Godfrey and His Friends and ukulele player died in 1983.

Scenes from a childhood

Before actor Robert Sean Leonard played Dr. James Wilson on the FOX TV series House, or was featured in such movies as Dead Poet's Society, Swing Kids, Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, and HBO's In The Gloaming, he was tossing newspapers on front walkways of his hometown, Ridgewood. According to Robert's younger brother Sean, who was also a Record paperboy and is currently a patrolman with the Ho-Ho-Kus police, the two delivered the paper in the 1980s, before they were eligible for working papers.

"Delivering newspapers offered us our earliest life lessons of discipline, responsibility and money management," says brother Sean. "No matter the circumstances, we had to deliver the papers. What we learned has been part of everything we've done."

All in the Family

For the Gaffneys of Teaneck, delivering The Record was a truly collaborative effort. Big sister Johanna (now Gaffney-Degelmann) first took a route in 1975 at age 12 and was later joined by younger brother Donald, and then Beth, currently a Mahwah resident with the surname Muliero. Finally, Sean, the baby – today a Bogota high school teacher – picked up the torch. For more than a dozen years, all told, a Gaffney brought the news to homes in this eastern Bergen town.

Newspapers were carried in a shopping cart "borrowed" from the local supermarket. At one point, the siblings had nearly 150 customers.

The siblings helped one another weather experiences like two nasty dog bites, as well as the regular paper drop to a funeral parlor, which Donald deemed "slightly freaky."
Johanna's route yielded a marriage proposal from a college student who promised to wait until she got out of her teens. Alas, she laughs, "It never panned out."


PHOTO CREDITS: SOMMER, FRANK, THE FADERS, MARINO, BASRALIAN, CHAMBERS, KENYON, SIMMS: Michael Bocchieri/(201) Magazine; ARMENANTE: Spike Nanrello/CBS; BANTA: Peter Monsees/The Record; DENNIS: Tariq Zehawi/The Record; SEMANCZUK: Hackensack University Medical Center; FOREMAN: Carmine Galasso/The Record; GATTO: Tariq Zehawi/The Record; TORONTO: Beth Balbierz/The Record; PACE: Thomas E. Franklin/The Record; REALE: Stephanie Berger; LEWIS, GODFREY, LUKAS: Record file photo; LEONARD: Nigel Parry/FOX

[This series of features originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of (201) Magazine]