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From time to time, I open my email in the predawn dark and find one from The Detroit News, the paper I subscribe to.
Delivery of your print edition may be delayed reads the subject line. I always delete it, unread. Delivery of my print edition, as far as I know, has never been delayed. Not since Virginia Dougherty of Mount Clemens became my carrier.
Virginia Dougherty, newspaper carrier, and her dog Jack. (Photo: Courtesy)
I’m usually leaving the house for the gym around 6 a.m. The paper is always there. Sometimes it snows overnight. It’s there. Sometimes there’s a fearsome cold snap like we just had, everyone in a tizzy, even the mail canceled. The paper is there, on the mat, usually so close to the door I don’t even need to set foot outside to pick it up.
We spend a lot of time in this country talking about work. Lots of Americans define themselves by the work they do -- creative, clerical, white collar, blue collar. But too many of us don’t think much about the work other people do, until it’s not done, or done badly. Virginia does her work when most people are asleep, and does it so well that she's invisible.
I knew I had to find and talk to Virginia after a few newspaper people in my network started tweeting back and forth about their carriers, mostly the bad ones. She was happy to discuss a job done while the rest of the city sleeps, for little respect but many complaints when it’s done wrong. She’s been doing it right for 30 years, through three pregnancies, watching her route dwindle as journalism’s business model has deteriorated, but still doing it well.
In my career in newspapers, I’ve sometimes heard reporters and editors moan to one another dramatically about how they work and slave to report and write the news, only to have the final step entrusted to some 14-year-old kid who doesn’t even read.
That era is long over, of course. Fourteen-year-olds no longer deliver papers; almost all are adults like Virginia, who delivers The News, Free Press, Macomb Daily, USA Today and New York Times, three days a week.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds is the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service. It could be Virginia’s, too, although her work is always done in gloom of night. And the heat, the snow, the rain? All encountered at some point, all overcome.
She used to get up at midnight, she said, and get right to work, but as more people drop home delivery, she starts at 1:30, with the goal of being finished with her route of around 250 customers in Grosse Pointe Woods by 5:30 a.m. Barring disaster, she makes it. The Pointes are a good place to work, she said. The snow is cleared quickly and it’s close enough to her home in Macomb that it works for her.
How does she manage such precision in placement of the paper on the step?
“I have a good arm,” she said. But she usually gets out of the car to get close enough to be accurate. Over 250 stops; that’s a lot of throwing, a lot of opening and closing the car door. She drives a 2017 Jeep Cherokee, if you were wondering.
The money is OK, she said, although she has to buy her own plastic bags, there are no benefits, and she has to find her own substitute if she wants to take a vacation. It supplements the money she makes cleaning houses. She’s 54 and would like to retire someday, at which point her good fortune would be my problem, because how many carriers would be as good as she is? She’s even choosy about who subs for her when she takes a vacation.
“I’m particular about who does it,” she said. Otherwise, “you come home to a big mess,” with disenchanted customers. She doesn’t blame them; “they’re paying a lot for their paper,” she said. “They deserve to get it delivered right.”
Carriers no longer make rounds to collect. My paper is paid for via automated withdrawal from my checking account. The only clue to her life comes just after Thanksgiving, when a card is inserted in the Sunday Free Press, often with a picture of Virginia’s dogs, wishing me happy holidays and with a mailing label with her name and address.
It’s a discreet reminder to tip, of course, and I do. Usually $50, although I’d send $500, if I could afford it. If you get a paper delivered, consider adding a tip to your next bill. Every job worth doing is worth doing well.
