This was my delivery route for the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1961. At least it’s what I remember at 2 am, waking in my living room chair in Placitas 64 years later.
Acequia Madre from Garcia Street to Camino del Monte Sol, Garcia from Acequia Madre to Canyon Road, Delgado from Acequia Madre to Canyon Road, Calle Corvo, Acequia Madre side streets.
I delivered to the Monkey House at the corner of Canyon Road and Delgado. And for a while, I had to go a couple of doors off my route and leave a paper on top of a wall of what at least formerly was the home of New Mexican gossip columnist B.B. Dunne at 501 East Garcia. This was not an easy chore because I was not on gossipy terms with a testy red-haired clan on the adjacent Arroyo Tenorio. Dunne died in 1962, reportedly slumped over his typewriter at home.
It was all very close to what was then my home on Abeyta Street. But I didn’t have the delivery route long because by the summer before the 8th grade I moved out of town to the end of Tano Road.
Throwing papers in the afternoon was pleasant in good weather, except for the Weimaraner bite on Calle Corvo and the St. Bernard who awaited me with a slobbery maw on one of the side streets between the original Tito’s and Acequia Madre Elementary. It was tough with the heavier Sunday paper at 2 am in the snow. Collections, door to door and in person, were the worst, though the zippered money pouch was cool.
Maybe because a friend with a neighboring route was sick, did I once have 200 papers in the bags stretched over my bicycle handlebars? The throwing distances were difficult with the big houses and long driveways up on the Garcia Street hill.
I longed for the Cushman motor scooter in Sears Roebuck’s big window on Lincoln Avenue. The older delivery guys in Santa Fe had them for one thing. Years later, Tom Lang, publisher of the Albuquerque Journal and my employer as a reporter and editor for 33 years, kept a sweet turquoise-colored model in the lobby of the Journal building on Jefferson, next to a huge Linotype machine and an AP teletype printer. I thought of my Santa Fe paper route and the Sears window every time I walked by.
At any rate, even before I got to daily deadlines, clacking typewriters and clunky computers, my life was once filled with rubber bands, canvas bags and inky, baton-sized newspapers, tightly rolled and hurled with inconsistent accuracy on the eastside of Santa Fe.
My Little League pitching for the Coronado Kiwanis, over at the ball fields on Cordova Road, then the south side of town, was about the same.
— 455 —
dream ranch 