LYNN — Extra! Extra! Read all about it. A former Daily Item delivery girl from the late 1970s remembers her Holyoke Street neighborhood paper route with nostalgia.
The name Carol Galeazzi may be recognizable to Lynn residents who had their newspaper, then known as the Daily Evening Item, delivered in her neighborhood at the time — now the 49-year-old Lynn Classical High School Class of 1986 graduate and valedictorian goes by the name Carol Ann Neff and lives in Bow, N.H.
“(Carol) is a role model to all of us,” said her friend, Kristen Giovanniello. “While Carol isn’t famous, she never missed a day of getting the paper delivered. She had one of the largest routes in Lynn. She was bit by dogs and delivered in the snow, sleet and rain.”
Neff graduated from Gordon College and works as an upper elementary school teacher in Hopkinton, N.H. She went to high school with her husband, Kenny Neff, and they have four children, including a daughter adopted from China. She moved out of Lynn in 1998, but would visit frequently until her father and mother died in 2005 and 2007 respectively.
In the lead-up to her 50th birthday next week, Neff has been writing words of gratitude on Facebook. In one of her posts, she expressed gratitude for her time as an Item papergirl, which she called the “best first job ever.
“I had my route for several years and it was one of the biggest in the city (I like to tell myself),” Neff said. “It got me outside walking every day. I knew my neighbors and they knew me.”
Neff said she got babysitting gigs from her paper route customers “because who wouldn’t want the kind and conscientious papergirl watching their children?” In the pre-Walkman days, she said the job gave her a chance to do a lot of thinking and to talk to herself a lot, facetiously recalling the deep conversations she used to have with herself.
Neff said she was probably 11 or 12 when she first started as a papergirl in sixth grade, working through middle school in the late 1970s to early 1980s. She delivered in the afternoons after getting home from school.
She lived on Holyoke Street at the time with her adoptive parents — she would start there, walk down to the nursing home at the end of the street, walk to Keslar Avenue, weave through Veterans Village and then come back to Holyoke Street. The route would take her an hour to an hour and a half.
Pay was pretty good too, Neff said. She made between $50 to $100 a week, which she said seemed like a fairly decent amount of money for a kid that age. She said she would put some in the bank and would be able to go to the mall.
Neff said she was able to buy the route from a boy on her street who was entering high school and moving onto another job. The way it worked, she said, was if someone was good at the job and responsible, one neighbor would talk to another neighbor and the papergirl or boy would be able to build the route.
“It seemed like I had doubled the size of the route that he had given me, which was a great lesson for a young kid,” Neff said. “If you’re responsible and you get things done on time, people can count on you and you benefit from that.”
The paper route also had its drawbacks, Neff said. She had to deal with bad weather, there was an occasional customer who forgot to pay, as she collected money for the paper from her customers, and she would sometimes encounter a mean dog — she still has a scar on her arm from a German shepherd.
Part of her nostalgia for the job, Neff said, is that a papergirl is one of those jobs that doesn’t really exist anymore. Now, The Item delivery is more corporate, and there are only a small group of kids who still deliver the paper, mostly children of police officers. There’s not that same responsibility with kids, according to The Item’s circulation manager, Lisa Mahmoud.
When she was a papergirl, Neff said she never worried about walking around in her neighborhood, as it seemed like she was surrounded by people who knew her. Times have changed, she said, citing the example that kids don’t walk to school anymore and her family doesn’t really know their neighbors in New Hampshire.
“That just seemed like a really nice part of childhood, being outside, knowing neighbors, making money, and learning how to manage money,” Neff said. “All of those things were really nice lessons … It taught me a lot of things and I am a pretty responsible person. Maybe I need to be grateful for that experience because maybe it taught me some things and helped me to be the person that I am today.”
