The door intercom sounded at nightfall. I saw an unfamiliar face on the screen. He yelled a word I couldn’t understand. “Who are you?” I asked. He yelled the same unintelligible word.
I hesitated. Letting an unknown person into the building was not without risk, also for the neighbours. Even when accepting parcels for others you had to be careful, it could be an excuse to get into the building. Caution has also become the mother of the apartment building.
Yet I let this man emerge, perhaps precisely because of his powerlessness to express himself intelligibly. When he had taken the curve of the stairs and his face appeared below me, he roared the word again – and suddenly I heard him. He shouted: “Newspaper delivery boy!” And he smiled a wide grin.
He was in his twenties with a wild head of hair and a gap between his front teeth. “Sorry”, I said, “the intercom distorted your voice, I couldn’t understand you.” “Yes, I am the delivery man,” he said in broken Dutch, “every morning I bring four newspapers here: The parole, Fidelity, de Volkskrant and NRC.” “Yes,” I said, “always sharply at 7 o’clock without a single skip.”
He stopped halfway up the stairs as I met him and handed me a purple piece of paper with the names of the newspapers he delivered. He didn’t have to say anything else, after all, the new year was approaching. “Come in, I’ll get the money,” I said, but he climbed only two steps higher and apparently preferred to stay there.
I brought him the money he took without looking at the value of the note. I wanted to say something more, but he was in a hurry and hurried down the stairs again. “Thank you!” he cried before disappearing into the chill darkness. The next day I read a note in a newspaper in which a reader complained that two delivery men from the same newspaper had asked for a tip—one of them must be an imposter. I thought about my delivery boy. No, I decided, how else could he have known that I was getting four newspapers?
Newspaper deliverers, I owe them a lot. As a writer for newspapers and as a reader of newspapers. They delivered my products and they gave me countless hours of reading pleasure. They used to be called newsboys; newspaper girls were there too, but they were a small minority.
There was even an expression, borrowed from the Dutch translation of a German boy’s book, that you hardly hear anymore: from newspaper boy to millionaire. It stood for someone who quickly and cleverly realized his ambitions. Thomas Edison, inventor and businessman, was one such person: he started out as a street vendor of newspapers. The journalist Sander de Kramer, once editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam street newspaper, turned it around and wrote the bestseller From millionaire to paperboy about successful people who hit rock bottom.
It is a dying profession, because the paper newspaper will increasingly transition into a digital newspaper. I hear editors-in-chief estimating five to ten years in which this change will materialize. Newspaper deliverers sometimes encounter the closed door of thrifty people around the turn of the year. Unfortunately. Keep them alive while you can.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 28, 2022 newspaper