Within a few days after I moved into the rented house with my family on Indianapolis's north side, I eagerly telephoned the office of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain's now-defunct local afternoon Indianapolis Times newspaper; and I expressed my interest in working for them as a newspaper delivery boy.
Given the fact that I pretty much lost any interest in devoting much of my life to the goal of individual money-making--rather than devoting most of my life to the goal of just helping humanity, artistic and creative expression, working for peace, justice and equality and giving to and sharing love with other people--by my junior year in high school, it's surprising, in retrospect, to recall how eager I was to begin working as an Indianapolis Times newspaper boy as a high school sophomore after I arrived in Indianapolis in late December 1962.
In my sixth grade class at P.S. 221 in the Little Neck-Douglaston neighborhood in Queens, south of the Long Island Expressway on Marathon Parkway, my non-authoritarian and lenient teacher, Mr. Smith, had appointed me to be the student in charge of of ordering by telephone each week's bundle of discounted, Monday-to Friday daily New York Times newspapers that were to be delivered to the school each morning.
So I was also the 6th-grader who was responsible for going around to each 5th and 6th grade class teacher every week, to record the number of daily New York Times newspapers they and their 5th or 6th grade class students had ordered for the next week, collecting the money from these teachers each week for the number of newspapers ordered and walking to P.S. 221 forty-five minutes before class started at 9 o'clock; in order to bring the bundle of New York Times newspapers, that the Times' delivery truck had dropped off in front of the school, into P.S. 221 and place the appropriate number of daily newspapers ordered on the floor in front of each 5th and 6th grade classroom door.
Mr. Smith was responsible for mailing the money I collected as payment for the delivery of each week's daily bundle of discounted New York Times newspapers by the New York Times Company's school distribution department. But I was the 6th-grade individual who briefly spoke personally by phone each week to the New York Times male employee responsible for making sure, in a serious businesslike way, that P.S. 221 would receive the right number of copies of newspapers in the following week.
Because, in 6th grade, I found it interesting being P.S. 221's "New York Times monitor," the thought never even crossed my mind (or even my parents' mind) that maybe I should have also been given some kind of monetary compensation by either Mr. Smith or the New York Times Company for doing this kind of newspaper distribution, order-taking and collection work for them in the 6th grade. But by the time I was a sophomore in Indianapolis, I had previously observed that the teenage newspaper delivery boys who brought my mother her copies of the Long Island Star-Journal and Newsday daily newspapers to read each day were earning some extra spending money each from this activity.
So I now realized that working as a newspaper delivery boy, besides being an activity that I still expected to be inherently interesting to me, was also a job from which I could earn some extra personal spending money for myself, in addition to the small amount of personal spending money that the weekly allowance I received from my father, as a teenager, then provided me with.
Even as a then-high school sophomore, I had no interest in spending money on clothes; and I didn't then yet need money to pay for an early 1960's date with a high school female classmate, because I wasn't dating anyone during my sophomore year in Indianapolis. So as it turned out, I ended up using most of the extra money I earned from being an Indianapolis Times afternoon edition and Sunday morning edition newspaper delivery boy to buy a Bell & Howell 8 mm home movie projector, to buy a cheap tape recorder (that quickly stopped working well after I purchased it) and to buy a lot of long-playing 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record albums of both Broadway hit musicals and Broadway flop musicals (since I still was more into Broadway musicals than into rock'n'roll or folk music during the first 6 months of 1963).
