Read all about it! Newsboys and paper carriers in Kawartha Lakes
Just in Time local history series
Imagine you have just picked up the latest issue of The Lindsay Advocate – no, not the magazine you are presently perusing (whether in print or online), but rather a broadsheet by the same name published by Edward Deanes Hand a few years before Lindsay was formally incorporated as a town. The year is 1855, and you are among the Advocate’s first subscribers. Although you have to make your way down to Hand’s office to pick up your paper and pay your subscription of ten shillings per annum, other publishers are employing a novel concept in spreading the news. Some 860 kilometres away, the New York Sun has been hiring boys to peddle its paper on the Big Apple’s streets. “Wouldn’t it be great to buy a paper on the street – or even better, have it delivered directly to my doorstep?” you ask yourself.
While it is unlikely that E.D. Hand employed newsboys to hawk his paper in those formative years, there is no question that they were a presence on local streets by the end of the nineteenth century. Hand sold the Advocate to Christopher B. Robinson’s Canadian Post around 1866, and within 30 years the Post was running competitions for its newsboys to see which of them could sell the greatest quantity of papers in a month. “The competition was keen – out of the large number who daily call for the papers 20 gave in their names, and have worked like beavers,” the Post informed its readers on Oct. 4, 1895. In the lead to win a new “stout set of clothes” were S. Ferguson (who sold 1,590 papers) and a W. McHugh (who sold 1,370 papers).
Competitions like this no doubt incentivized newsboys in what could be dangerous and unpleasant work, undertaken for minimum pay. Local newsboys were no doubt aware of violent strike action taken by their counterparts in New York City in the summer of 1899 over unfair compensation. Their parents, by contrast, were probably more concerned about their offspring working on streets and entering places of ill repute. Indeed, a provincial committee tasked with studying child labour recommended in 1907 that laws be passed to govern the “street trades, such as newspaper vending.” On the heels of this report, in the spring of 1908, the local police chief issued a directive ordering newsboys to steer clear of bar-rooms or “other licensed premises in which liquor is dispensed.”
By the 1930s, the newsboy who hawked his wares from the street corner had by and large evolved into the paper carrier with a dedicated delivery route. Even though carriers could now enter hotels to sell their papers, doing so remained taboo. Paul Skipworth delivered the Globe & Mail in the 1940s to residents living at the Kent Hotel in downtown Lindsay, and remembers the ominous warnings issued by his mother: “you deliver the papers and then get out of there.”
Things had changed by the mid-1970s, when Dan McQuarrie took up a Lindsay Daily Post route and regularly ventured into not only local bars and hotels to deliver papers, but also the “rickety and dark” apartments above the Stedmans store on Kent Street. “I think there was one incandescent lightbulb for the two floors,” he recalls, adding that “the back door was always open, with snow coming in.”
Other places were more inviting, and McQuarrie especially remembers the hospitality of Annie Nesbitt – a widow from Glenarm who had relocated to an apartment adjacent to the Grand Hotel. “On my collection days, she would prepare a boiled hotdog on a piece of white bread and hot chocolate with boiled water – no milk,” McQuarrie says. “She would chat and chat and chat, and I was usually there for a good 15 or 20 minutes. In the wintertime it was a little bit longer, but I didn’t mind staying there and staying warm.” With tips accumulated en route, McQuarrie might have treated himself to a tray of French fries at Deighton’s chip truck or a Laura Secord chocolate bar at Sylvestre’s Pharmacy. Otherwise, McQuarrie says, it was back to the Post building on William Street where bills were paid up “and whatever change was left in your pockets was your profit for the week.”
Picking up papers was always an interesting experience, particularly when the Post’s ancient printing presses failed. “It wasn’t uncommon for the presses to break down, and you might be sitting for half an hour or an hour for your papers,” McQuarrie recalls. To pass time, some paper carriers played amid the giant rolls of newsprint supplied to the Post by the Abitibi Paper Co.
Outside of Lindsay, the Post employed local agents to deliver the paper and collect subscriptions. Perhaps the most well-known of these was the late Stanley Dayton (profiled in the July 2018 Advocate), who did the job in Little Britain for more than half a century. More than 30 years after Dayton’s death in 1990, the rural subscription agent has become an anachronism and the paper carrier may well one day become a thing of the past as Canadians turn to online platforms for their news, rather than turn to newsprint. Nevertheless, the faithfulness with which these individuals urged us to “read all about it” remains an important part of media history here in Kawartha Lakes.
