Special Deliveries

We didn’t get the AJC this morning, or, really the past few, but they were mornings strung together like little beads of Christmas chaos– house guests, present-wrapping, cooking, etc., so I barely noticed until today. We still had the paper delivered because I like to do the crossword every morning and typing letters into a computer grid isn’t the same as sitting with a cup of tea and an English Muffin, writing and erasing madly at the kitchen counter.  I come from a long line of morning crossword puzzle doers. My father, for all his dysfunction, still managed to complete the daily crossword, in ink and impeccable, every day before he left for work.

I figure the carriers are sick of the whole thing now that the paper will be digital only and they’re about to lose their jobs. Probably, we’re the only customers on our street at this point, easy to skip, and, anyway, I can empathize because I used to be a carrier for the AJC when I taught part-time and had three little daughters I could bring with me during the week. I did it for several years, in fact, back when there were two papers, The Constitution in the morning and The Journal in the afternoon. They were combined on Saturdays and Sundays, ensuring an odious start to every weekend, but the carriers – ahhh, the carriers. I have never, before or since, encountered so much humor, talent, and diversity collected in one place, despite the ungodly hour. There were teachers, musicians, authors, artists, grandparents, students, postal workers, psychiatrists (well, one psychiatrist, an early heart transplant recipient, who took on an apartment route for the exercise). Our conversations were hilarious, our unity sublime. It was like an endless uncensored sitcom. Friendships and relationships sometimes extended beyond the warehouse, but mostly they were confined to the small hours, as my British coworker used to call that time just before dawn, to folding papers, to double-bagging on rainy days, and at one point, union organizing.

That was my idea. When Cox Enterprises decided to double our workload for the same amount of money, thus cutting our pay in half, I called around until I found help in the unlikely form of the Hotel Workers Union. The person who contacted me was Reverend James Orange. I loved James Orange. He was very big and very interesting. He wore a large medallion around his neck, and he told me he was on the balcony in Memphis beside Martin Luther King Jr. when he was murdered. He and I had clandestine meetings in various restaurants and diners to give and receive updates. If we could get enough signatures, it would be the first time carriers were able to vote for a union. It was all very exciting. And fun! For weeks the petition was passed around under the noses of management, my youngest daughter helping, and then we’d load the car with papers and take off. Lawyers were called in from Detroit to quash this uprising and ferret out the leaders, but they were not successful.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. There was palpable unity, but there were also threats, and there was the night someone cut the wires under the hood of my car.  On the best of times list, Reverend Orange planned to send me around the country as an organizer in a sort of Norma Ray capacity, and I imagined myself standing atop endless paper-folding tables, fists pumping inky air, rallying the workers in the small hours.

I hadn’t actually thought things through, of course, the logistics of the thing – husband and children, dogs, cats, teaching job, dirty dishes – but as it happened, I didn’t have to. The paper brought in people to vote against the Union that none of us had ever seen before.

We should have won. We did not win, however, and the minute our six-month protection period was up, we were fired, picked off, one by one. We tried. That’s all we could do. It was exciting. It was exhilarating and empowering, and we got the first union vote ever for paper carriers, even if the odds were stacked, so to speak, against us.

A few years later, when I was working at Literacy Action on the corner of Forsyth and Marietta and one of my old bosses from the paper had been hugely promoted to a position at the corporate AJC office, also on Marietta Street, he invited me to lunch. I forget the restaurant now, but I remember saying I’d meet him outside his building since It was on the way. “No! No!” he pretty much yelled at me. “I’ll meet you outside YOUR building!” When I asked him why and pointed out my building was not at all on the way, he explained that my name was still brought up as a cautionary tale, that I was still a stain on the Cox Corporate fabric, and that, much as he liked me, it would not bode well for him to be seen with me.

I was delighted.

So, goodbye printed AJC. Goodbye erasure-scarred crossword puzzles (I do NOT do mine in ink). Goodbye. I will miss you. And thanks for the memories.