THE AFTERNOON PAPER ROUTE

By: Michael A. Aun, FIC, LUTCF, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame

One of my favorite after-school undertakings growing up was to stop in at the Feed & Seed on Main Street in the little town of Lexington, SC as I peddled the now defunct Columbia Record through town. The store was located near the 5 & 10 and Robert's Grocery.

Wallace Redd owned the shop, the father of a classmate of mine, Ronald Redd. Mr. Redd was also my Cub scoutmaster growing up.

The store had a distinct odor when you walk in, as you would expect. I enjoyed the regular tour provided by Ron and his dad. Perhaps the most fun of all was running your hands through the feed and seed.

I knew the Redd family on several levels. They were neighbors of some of my favorite cousins, the Eli Mack, Jr. kids. I would peddle my bike over to the Mack house on Elm Street, where I would play as a child with all the neighborhood gang including Janet Taylor, Ron Redd, Sammy Strait and a host of others, including little Eli, my first cousin.

Janet Taylor's parents had a cool candy factory out behind their home. They made homemade candies in those days and I got to test more than my fair share of samples, which helped account for my weight issues early on in life.

I peddled newspapers through that same neighborhood in my pre-teen years, tossing the old Columbia Record to many a doorstep. My favorite afternoon stop came later in the route when I would visit another classmate, Sammy Strait.

Depending on how many kids were out and about, we usually had a nice afternoon football game. Sometimes it was only Sammy and I but that never stopped us from a one-on-one football game. Later in life, Sammy and I were high school teammates. I threw many a block for him.

Sadly, Sammy's mom recently passed away after a long and illustrious career with the county as an auditor. I ended up purchasing that home later in my adult life when I owned a Lexington real estate firm ERA-Aun Realty Group. It's funny the way things unfold in your life.

Another interesting stop on my afternoon bike route was at a store in the intersection of Hendrix Street and Gibson Pond Road. The proprietor resoled shoes, which was important for most of us poor folk around Lexington. We couldn't afford to buy new shoes in those days. I had ten brothers and sisters, so we knew more about second-hand clothes than most folks. The shop put new soles on your old shoes, so business was always brisk.

The shop also sold candy and junk food, so I stopped there to spend some of the profits from my paper route. I would always put pennies into the speckled ball bubble gum machine. If you got a speckle ball, the proprietor gave you a candy bar.

In retrospect, it was gambling on a less-than-grandiose scale. I would always "bank" my speckled balls with the proprietor and cash them in when I needed to trade some candy for something one of my buddies was hustling that particular week, like the latest girlie magazine. Go ahead; deny that you didn't do some of the same kind of bartering when you were growing up.

My afternoon goal was to make it back to my house before it got dark. Lexington's streets were not exactly well lighted in those days and peddling down Hendrix Street at the wrong time of night might get most kids carrying newspaper subscription money mugged. We actually collected the subscription fees in those days. However, I always got along well with all the locals and never once had a confrontation. They all saw me as a resource. I brought them the news.

I think I actually got interested in writing at about the same time because I read the daily afternoon paper as I rolled them up with a rubber band to toss them to my customers.

I thought to myself…I can write. Why not try it sometime? By the time I was 16, I was writing for the Cayce-West Columbia Journal, the Lexington Dispatch-News, occasionally for the Twin-City News in Batesburg-Leesville, an Irmo newspaper owned by the Bruner family, who ran the Dispatch-News and occasionally for the State newspaper in Columbia as a "stringer," covering high school sports. I eventually became the Sports Editor of my high school newspaper, The Wildcat, and was later the Sports Editor of the Lexington Dispatch-News, which today is the Lexington Chronicle.

My columns appear in as many as 60 publications all over America, and all of it started with an afternoon paper route. Who'd thunked it?