The Paper Drive: Another Stumble Down Memory Lane

The crisp colors and temperatures of fall remind me of the paper drives we held at Tuttle Grade School in Southeast Minneapolis when I was a moppet.

Everyone took the newspaper in those wasteful and extravagant days. Delivered to your doorstep before the dew was gone in the morning, and then again as the meatloaf came out of the oven at eventide. Sitting on the porch reading the newspaper was as common and iconic as raking leaves in the fall or cutting the grass with a push reel mower in the summer.

And those were days when the long shadow of the Great Depression still lingered in the minds, if not the wallets, of my parents. You cleaned your plate. You turned off the lights when nobody was in a room. You saved up string and rubber bands and newspapers; because there was no telling when you might need to tie up a parcel for mailing or spread out some newspapers prior to filleting a dozen crappie -- and nobody in their right mind made a trip to the store just to buy string or an extra newspaper.

And so every well-regulated household had its pile of newspapers in the basement or the garage. And there it sat, gathering dust and sheltering silverfish, until the annual paper drive.

Memory no longer informs me what the money raised was used for -- perhaps a new mimeograph machine or school field trip to the Bell Museum.

What I do recall distinctly is my sudden decision to pretend I had an allergy to the sisal twine used to bind up the stacks of newspapers. The twine had a peculiar tangy odor and was stiff and prickly. You could almost get a splinter from it.

Out of the blue I told my second grade teacher, Mrs. Redd, that I was allergic to twine. In proof I began sneezing the minute a ball of twine was brought near me. They were unconvincing sneezes; weak and insincere. But Mrs. Redd swallowed my fib -- hook, line, and sinker. And thereafter, right through sixth grade, I was excused from having to tie up the stacks of lose newspapers.

I never had to worry much about bringing in a goodly amount of newsprint. My mother religiously kept every edition, neatly bundled and tied with string (not twine), and had me lug each stack out to the garage for safekeeping. Plus our next door neighbor was old Mrs. Henderson, a widow whose basement was a fire trap from the extent of her newspaper collection. Brown and flaking, she had copies dating back to World War Two (the newspapers were brown and flaking, that is; not Mrs. Henderson). Each year she graciously allowed me to scoop up a dozen or so bundles for the paper drive.

So I had it made in the shade. I loaded the bundles on my wagon on a glorious autumn day and trundled them the one block to Tuttle, where they joined a huge pile on the front lawn that soon took on the dimensions of a small turreted castle nearly two stories high. I dumped my stack and then joined the other kids in climbing to the top of the pile to yodel like Tarzan while the turrets swayed like a pendulum. How and why no one was ever buried alive in a newspaper avalanche is still a mystery to me. Maybe guardian angels aren't such a myth after all . . .


Teachers and students alike dreaded one thing during the paper drive -- a long soaking rain. Such an occurrence would turn the newspapers to mush, making them useless to sell. The pile grew so large that no single sheet of canvas could cover it all. Half-hearted measures were made to cover it up piecemeal with old blankets and tents at night. But everyone kept a weather eye peeled until the big truck came from the paper mill to pick it all up.

In fifth grade an evil idea came to me and my comrades during the paper drive. Since the paper was sold by weight, what if we were to surreptitiously slip a few bricks and stones into our paper bundles, thus fraudulently increasing the take?

Our crime was discovered by Mr. Berg, the sixth grade teacher. Under his stern gaze we sullenly removed the rip rap from our bundles. He then bade us begone, and never sully the good name of Tuttle Grade School again with such low maneuvers.

I would have felt pretty bad about it, except that evening I happened to take a stroll over to the schoolyard, since I lived just a block away, and saw Mr. Berg and a few other teachers, under cover of darkness, dousing some of the newspaper bundles with buckets of water -- and they were NOT attempting to put out any fire . . .