A family on Longridge Court had become new subscribers, and would be receiving their first Tribune this morning.
On Springside Circle, a family was going away on vacation and had requested that delivery of the newspaper be stopped until they returned.
Each weekday, more than 733,000 copies of the Tribune are sold; on Sundays that number exceeds 1.1 million. Those of us who write the stories that go into the paper, edit the copy, shoot the photographs and lay out the pages are usually vaguely aware of those numbers. The numbers are pretty enormous-they are the kind of numbers that are too big to really understand.
What we don`t always visualize is the family on Longridge Court. At 3 o`clock in the morning, in a warehouse-like building in Naperville, I saw on a chart that the family on Longridge Court had decided to have the Tribune delivered to their home every morning, and that their house would be on Jennifer Foss` route-one of 282 papers she was responsible for delivering each day. Foss was the reason I was here.
She had said that without people like her, people like me wouldn`t have a job-and had told me I ought to deliver the paper one morning, just so I could get a look at the news business somewhat different from the one most reporters and editors learn to take for granted. And she was right-for all the endless sermonizing and grandiose pontificating about so-called media issues, few of us who write for newspapers ever give much thought to the simple question of how our stories get from our keyboards to the people who read them each day. The concept of 733,000 papers is easy to take on faith; the concept of one paper ending up at one house is paradoxically more difficult.
So as 3 a.m. approached, dozens of men and women waited in the Naperville warehouse for the big semitrailer truck to arrive from downtown, bearing just- printed news sections. Some of the men and women read the preprinted sections that were already on hand: Tempo, the Food Guide, some advertising sections. One man smoked a cigar. One fellow lay on top of a wooden table, passing the time.
At that hour of the night, the slightest sound-a sudden laugh, the scraping of a grocery cart`s wheels against the floor-can seem overwhelmingly loud. The truck from downtown was running a few minutes late. When it arrived, the men and women in the warehouse lined up behind their carts with a bustling eagerness you might expect in a supermarket where prime steaks were somehow on sale for a penny a pound. The first carriers to get their news sections off the truck and into the carts would be the first carriers to wrap them up with the preprints; the first ones with the sections wrapped up would be the first to hit the streets.
At Jennifer Foss` table, we grabbed the fresh news sections, combined them with the preprints, and slipped them into thin blue plastic bags. She was a whiz at this, doing it in one motion; I had constant trouble figuring out how to make the newspaper fit into the bag. Had I had to bag all the papers on our route, that morning`s Tribune would have arrived at subscribers` homes around dinnertime. If we were lucky.
”You want to see someone good, check out that lady over there,” Foss said. She nodded in the direction of a woman named Sheila Howe, whose hands and arms were moving so fast you could barely see them. The piles of newspapers on Howe`s tables were disappearing almost as if they were an optical illusion, turning into bulging blue plastic-covered tubes.
Deadlines are deadlines, regardless of whether you`re an editor or a reporter-or whether your job is to deliver the paper to someone`s house. In this particular warehouse more than 18,000 papers arrive around 3 a.m. each weekday, more than 27,000 on a Sunday, and they must all be wrapped with the preprints and on their way within the span of an hour or two. I struggled with the news section and Business and Tempo and Sports and all the rest, trying to jam them into the plastic bags; already some of the men and women were wheeling their grocery carts toward their waiting cars outside.
”Let`s go,” Jennifer Foss said. We rolled our grocery carts to her Ford Taurus, its roof and hood covered with dew, and loaded the 282 Tribunes into the back seat. They filled her car up, from floor to ceiling. It was 4:02 a.m. as we climbed in to go deliver them. They had to be delivered to all 282 houses by 6:30.
”Let me know if you start feeling carsick,” Foss said as we headed off for our first street, Saginaw Court.
”Why would I feel carsick?” I said.
”You`ll see,” she said.
TUESDAY: One by one.
