Those Early Morning Rounds

Her name was Miss Cronk, and she lived in a rental building atop the Avenue Road hill in Toronto. Mayfair Mansions, it was called, though her stifling apartment was hardly a mansion. It was a claustrophobic warren of newspapers piled close to the ceiling. Like the Great Pyramid of Giza, it defied easy comprehension of its creation.

Miss Cronk listened for me each morning, between 6:30 and 7 a.m., cracking her door just as I got there. She accepted each issue of the Globe and Mail as if it were a gift.

Every month or so, I knocked on her door after dinner. “Who is it?” she’d call. “Collecting,” I’d answer. “Ah yes, just a moment,” she’d coo, as if this was the high point of her week. It didn’t occur to me that no one else ever knocked on her door. I’m sure she would have invited me to step inside, if there’d been anywhere to step.

She would’ve been perfect for Hoarders. Back then she was simply a sweet, eccentric, white-haired woman with a Friar Tuck bald patch who always tipped me a quarter and engaged me with something in the news. Was I happy the Leafs had won the Stanley Cup (I’m dating myself here)? Wasn’t it awful about the thalidomide babies? Did I like the new Maple Leaf flag?

The morning I snapped open the wire on my bundle and found a STOP notice for Apt. 301, Mayfair Mansions, I understood at once. This was my first real encounter with mortality. A couple of weeks later, as I did my early morning rounds, I watched workmen cart load after load of newsprint back to a dumpster in the alley. All those towers of news, gone with Miss Cronk.

Also in the building was Mr. Bannerman, who lived in a suffocating miasma of pipe smoke, music, and books. He worked in radio — my mother heard him on the CBC on Sunday nights — and I’d catch the metronomic click of his typewriter as I approached his door to collect.

He always answered in a white undershirt, dingy boxers, and black socks held up with garters. Behind him, from the shower rod in the bathroom, hung the nicotine-infused tweed jacket and grey flannels he apparently wore every day of his life. He rifled through these in search of a few bucks, an apologetic, panting fellow with the barrel chest and spindly legs of an emphysemic. One night he cobbled together enough change to cover what he owed, then offered me candies he called humbugs and asked me if I, too, liked relaxing in my underwear.

Mr. Tanenbaum, who lived in the Benvenuto, a short walk away, was the owner of York Steel, which sponsored my bantam hockey team. At the time, my father was trying to organize York Steel’s labour force on behalf of the steelworkers’ union. I understood, even at an early age, that it would be unwise to draw attention to the family connection. The fortune Mr. Tanenbaum made and passed on helps sustain, among many other things, the Canadian Opera Company. His son Larry Tanenbaum is now, among many other things, chair emeritus of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment.

Each day I dropped papers at the doors of the FitzGeralds, of University of Toronto medical school fame; Cleeve Horne, whose sculptures decorated University Avenue; and Gordon Lightfoot, then a rather bitter-seeming fellow who kept strange hours. Ron Haggart and Robert Fulford, both newspapermen, walked home past our house each afternoon. To my parents, they were celebrities.

The artist Michael Snow lived a few doors down. Johnny F. Bassett, owner of the Toronto Toros and father of the tennis prodigy Carling Bassett, lived across from us. Around the corner on Avenue Road, Mashel and Ethel Teitelbaum led messy lives of which my mother seemed to approve, explaining that they were artists. Their scruffy kids Sari and Matthew played in the dirt with my little sister as the Avenue Road bus lumbered past. Sari became a cellist and lawyer, while Matthew served as the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario and later of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

A few doors south, the Hollywood mogul Ivan Reitman’s parents — the director Jason Reitman’s grandparents — owned Albright Cleaners, which wafted out a scent like overripe bananas as pressing machines sighed and hissed in the summer, when the Reitmans worked in short sleeves. One day I went with my father to pick up his suit and saw the numbers inked in Mrs. Reitman’s forearm. Such was my introduction to the Holocaust.

The time came, in my mid-teens, when I began reading the paper beyond the sports page. The Globe and Mail, not television, was the start of my apprehension of the wider world. Beyond Gordie Howe and Mickey Mantle lay Fidel Castro and Francis Gary Powers, OPEC and the petrodollar, the United Nations and the Vietnam War.

Gradually I found things to talk about with my father, who read voraciously. He explained that what people saw in the paper, offered as fact, was better understood as one-sided bullshit or at least an oversimplification of complexity from which other interpretations could, and often should, be drawn. He taught me how to bet with a decent poker hand. He also taught me, when I started driving, not to trust traffic lights. “They tell you what’s supposed to happen, not what’s going to happen.”

After dinner, especially if one of his acolytes had joined us and a bottle was at hand, he’d make sweeping pronouncements. “One day China will rule the world,” he’d say, downing a slug of rum. (Wait, I’d think — the China whose starving children Mom invoked to guilt us into eating our cauliflower?)

“Oh, there’ll be another war. There will always be another war. The United States needs wars to make the military companies profitable.”

“One day the U.S. will come and take what they need — water, lumber, nickel.”

“This is a Canadian station. Why the fuck are we watching a news item about a traffic pileup in Arizona?”

“If I had one wish, I’d take the heads of the big banks and line them up against the wall.” (His own father was a banker.)

He said all these things in the 1960s, when I was attending private school with kids who bore familiar WASP surnames. I thought it was the rum talking. How was a teenager to understand that his learned socialist father was actually prescient enough to see the implausible moving toward the inevitable, the dystopian nightmare seeping into daylight.

Of the three Toronto papers, the Globe was the best one to deliver. It was lighter than the afternoon papers. Most days it folded neatly in four, and on your bike you could hit a porch from the sidewalk. Unlike the Star and the Telegram, it also left you free to play baseball or chess after school.

At one point I had perhaps the three best Globe routes in the city. Getting to them was a challenge I solved with my mother’s Rambler station wagon. I’d finish my Cottingham route, drive up Poplar Plains for my Benvenuto route, then head down to Charles Street and do my Colonnade route. It worked like a charm until the morning a cruiser lit up behind me on Bloor Street West.

“May I see your driver’s licence?”

“I’m not old enough to have a licence, sir.”

“What are you doing in this car?”

“Delivering papers.”

“Whose car is it?”

“My mom’s.”

“Can I see proof of ownership and insurance?”

Luckily, the paperwork was in the glove compartment. The cop debated whether to send me straight to reform school or let me drive home in return for my promise not to use the car again until I had a licence. I believe I replied in some reassuring way —“Yes, sir, I understand”— that didn’t include the word “promise.”

Mom eventually got a ticket in the mail for allowing a minor to operate her motor vehicle. I was back behind the wheel the next morning.

My dad liked that story. So did my daughter, when she was fourteen and learning to drive. “Traffic lights tell you what to do,” I said. “But don’t just look at the lights. Look around in case somebody doesn’t see them or decides to ignore them.”

“Global is a Canadian station,” I’d tell her as we watched the news. “Why do we need to know about a bank robbery in Tennessee?”

“Remember, sweetie, he’s just a guy in a suit reading whatever the prompter says after a deep voice goes, ‘And now the news . . .’ ”

Now in my seventies, at the short end of a life concerned largely with finding stuff out, I still sometimes dream about delivering newspapers. I’m walking down a hallway in the Benvenuto, but I forget which doors get one, so I choose randomly. Or, near the end of my route, I’ve got five more drops but only three papers left. In the dream I do what I did back then: make five out of three, figuring people were less likely to complain about a missing news or sports or entertainment section than about getting no paper at all.

Delivering the news taught me many things. That people once happily paid for information. (When we lived in Kitimat, British Columbia, my customers subscribed to and read the two-day-old Vancouver Sun.) It taught me that people on a paper route can range from the modest Miss Cronk to the commanding Mr. Tanenbaum. And that, generally, the wealthier people are, the harder they find it to come up with a five-dollar bill.

It taught me that history, like Miss Cronk’s apartment, is the slow accumulation of the quotidian that most people discard and forget. But perhaps the great lesson my father and my paper routes taught me — worth recalling as books get banned, people get bundled into unmarked vans, and news curdles into propaganda — is this: what you know to be real and true, and how hard you’re willing to hold on to it, is who you are.