Around the World in Sixty Minutes

Before television and internet, someone had to bear the burden of delivering the news hot off the press to folk in my little town. Paper boys would gather with their big-basket bicycles early every morning at the bus station to receive their route bundles.  We would sit on the curbs and roll each edition with a rubber band or fold them into a flat square which would sail better when thrown from bike to porch. I hand tossed the “Clarion Ledger” each and every morning, come rain or shine, and finished in just about an hour.

At the time I didn’t appreciate the cultural capital on the receiving end of my labors and how these assorted varieties of human beings formed my worldview. For example, the Powell’s house was your basic small town mansion, and I was expected to drive silently through the porte-cochère, hand the paper to the butler each morning, and receive a dime tip from his white-gloved hand for the extra effort.  Another favorite was Rabbi Max Lewinthal, who lived on the second floor of the old Grady Hotel on Fulton Street. He always went by “Rabbi” and often he invited me into his rather humble abode at six-thirty in the morning for some kind of kosher pastry and a bit of Yiddish wisdom.

My little town was quite cosmopolitan when it came to countries and religions of origin, and my job was to connect these people to the larger world by throwing the local and international news on their porches every morning. Most of the merchants were either Jewish or Lebanese who, like my own grandparents [with roots in Ireland and Scotland] in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, had used the railways to find their way to the middle of Mississippi on the Illinois Central connecting Chicago and New Orleans. At its peak, Canton was home to Roman Catholics, Protestants, and approximately 100 Jewish families, all of whom brought their European cultural heritage and combined it with the cultures of the South: the Wieners from Germany, along with the Lehmann brothers who operated the movie theaters; the Perlinskys from Poland; the Hesdorffers from France. Our nearest neighbors included the Kaplans and the Rosens who were from Odessa in the Ukraine.

The Iupes and Saabs were from Lebanon, as was Waddell Thomas who owned and operated the Mecca Cafe. In 1967, three years after defeating Sonny Liston, Mohammed Ali drops by the Mecca through the kitchen door, of course, to visit with his wife’s uncle who was a cook. Seizing the moment, Waddell runs out to the table full of his buddies and bets them he can produce the boxing champion right there and then. He did, they lost their bets, and there’s a sign on the back of a chair claiming “Mohammed Ali sat here.” That was “breaking news!” before the term became quite commonplace.

This was the town where many nationalities formed the E Pluribus Unum that took root in my soul. Growing up among the rich and varied ethnicities of such folks made me a lucky paper boy who appreciated all those dear hearts and gentle hometown people who taught me just how small the world was after all.

My luck, however, would run out on me at the end of the daily route. The major downside of this noble profession was the location of the paper drop off at the bus station where two pinball machines tenaciously tempted me to spend some of my hard earned profit each week.