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TI: Well, let me now go back. You just mentioned that how in 1935, you started as a, a newspaper boy. So you must have been about nine years old or so.

RM: Yes. Yeah, I can date it because I remember the first newspaper I sold. It was Wiley Post and Will Rogers crashing at Nome, Alaska. And I think I'd sold seven or eight papers, it was a big thing, and my mother asked me where I'd been. It was an afternoon newspaper in Boise. And I said, "Well, I got a job selling papers," and one of the fellows in the grade school I was running with took me down there, and I signed up and checked out the papers and sold them, and did quite well. And I said to my mother, "Do you mind?" She said, "Well, it's all right as long as your grades don't suffer." And so I sold papers beginning in '35 until I was forced, I think, at the age of fifteen, child labor law went in and said you couldn't sell papers --

TI: Well, going back to that first, that first time you sold papers, what, what made you interested in selling papers? What was it that was exciting or...

RM: Well, I was, I think that's the birth of my love of history. I would read the paper before I tried to sell it, and I, if I were going into a saloon that had the sporting games, had the box scores, baseball and that sort of thing, I knew enough to hawk the paper on sports, and people would buy it. And so, and if I were going down political row, down by the Hotel Boise, where the politicians were, I'd, I'd talk about politics, national, state and local. And that was the way we adapted the newspaper to sell it. And if I had read the paper, I could sell better. I knew that. And so that's how I sold papers, and I had, each of us had a corner, there were about... sometimes there were eighteen people selling after school, sometimes there were eight. And our sales, we soon realized, were dependent upon whether there was an eventful day or not. And the paper was isolationist. It was opposed to preparation for World War II, that sort of thing. Both papers, but one was worse than the other. And if there was, something big really happened, then we'd get up early and sell the Statesman in the morning.

TI: Oh, so you could cross over and sell... because you sold, was it the Capital News?

RM: I sold with Capital News from '35 to, I'll betcha 1940.

TI: And so that was the afternoon, the afternoon newspaper, and then they had a, Statesman was in the morning?

RM: The morning paper, right.

TI: And, and how would the Statesman be distributed? Would that, would that same thing --

RM: Well, we'd, we'd go greet the crowd on Saturday night coming out of the dance halls and the restaurants.

TI: Okay. So, so it actually came out really late at night, and you were able to get the --

RM: Yeah, yeah. And we, we would also... there was a midnight movie, and we'd always meet that crowd with the Statesman. And so there was a nightlife within Boise. And my mother was working the Chesapeake Cafe, and it was open 'til, to get the late crowd from the, the movies, and we knew we had to be home before she was home, my brother and I. We sold together.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.