𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐑𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟓: 𝐏𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐜: 𝐖𝐞 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭

 𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐑𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟓: 𝐏𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐜: 𝐖𝐞 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭

Okay, so the Silver Bullet was a cat, but my silver car wasn't exactly a bullet. It was closer to a slug. My 1982 Pontiac J2000 Hatchback didn't go as fast as it looked, but I loved it. I loved that car so much I have a model of it on my bedroom dresser to this day.

For some reason, the 'J-Body' or 'J-Cars': the Chevy Cavalier; Pontiac J2000/2000/2000 Sunbird/Sunbird; Oldsmobile Firenza; Buick Skyhawk; and Cadillac Cimmaron, developed a rather unenviable reputation in North America as 'econoboxes' with poor quality control and reliability issues. As someone who drove countless hundreds of thousands of kilometers in them in the worst imaginable conditions, I strongly object to that branding. Vehemently, as a matter of fact.

Nowadays, paper carriers are almost completely a thing of the past. The dawn of the internet changed the way we access media. But, back in the day, there were newspaper boxes everywhere. Newspapers were Big Business. Think: 'The Daily Bugle' from the Spiderman comics and TV cartoon and you're on the right track.

Each newspaper had its own distinct 'route tubes', or paper boxes, in their signature colour with their own logo on them. Earlier boxes were a plain, hard plastic that was rather brittle in the cold. Just an overgrown tissue box with one end cut out. The open end was cut back on an angle to give a bit of an overhang to protect the newspaper from rain. Those boxes shattered if hit by ice or wet snow from the snowplow, or a mirror from a less skillful paper carrier or anyone pulling up to their box to grab their paper on the way to or from work. All of the boxes on my route were of that old style. A year or two after I started, a new style box came out. It was a much softer plastic, which did not shatter, and it had a 'fish lip' like a catfish, around the opening, which increased the soft plastic's rigidity a little. Also the rounded edge made it easier to hit the box on the fly. If you hit the edge of the old box on the fly, your newspaper shot back at you and, if you were really unfortunate, exploded all over the place, both inside and outside the car. In windy conditions, that made for a bad morning. The new boxes greatly reduced that potential, because not only did they have the fish lip opening, but they were larger and slightly tapered all the way from the closed end to the open one. I loved those boxes and changed my entire route over to them. I think I got paid something like 4 dollars a box for every box I repaired or replaced. I would have done it for free for how it made my job so much easier. The only thing about those new boxes was the soft plastic tended to misshape in the heat of summer and look kind of saggy. When they did, I replaced them. I liked the rigidity of the old ones because they looked good until they broke, but the new ones practically never broke, but would slump on their posts over time. The old ones faded and looked drab even if they were fully intact, but the new ones retained their signature Ottawa Citizen bright yellow colour indefinitely.

All that said, I wasn't Dick. Dick was 'slow and steady wins the race'. Danny was the Jackrabbit. I flew around the route. Sideways. That J2000 was no drag racer, but it was one of the best handling cars I have ever owned and carved corners like it was on rails.

When I first started the paper route, nearly 2 thirds of it was on gravel roads. As the route was pretty well dead on 100 miles, that made about 66 miles of gravel roads. Stoppa Road, the Bromley Town Line, Rox Siding Road, Pinewood Park Road, Dombroski Road, The Garden of Eden Road, Orin Road, Calvin Road, Sarah-Prisilla Drive, Jeffery Lake Road, Acres Road, Mineview Road, Service Road (or Beebe Road), Bingham Road, Hydro Bay Road, Westross Road, Fletcher Road, Pleasant Valley Road, and Rafting Road were all gravel. Now most of those are asphalt.

Washboard gravel is hard on a car. Washboard gravel is MURDER on a car loaded with 5-600 pounds of newspapers on a Saturday morning. I hated Saturdays. There's no nice way to put it. The Saturday Citizen was huge. And there were slippery ad inserts I had to put in to every single paper. I kept the newspapers and the inserts in two separate stacks in the passenger seat. Between boxes, as I drove with my left hand, my right hand was opening the next newspaper to the middle, grabbing an insert and putting it in, and closing the newspaper and rolling it into a suitable size package for hitting the next box.

Because the Saturday Citizen was so huge, and by far the highest selling paper of the week in the stores, I had to do Saturday morning in two loads. The back seat could be folded forward to create a flat load area from the backs of the front seats all the way to the taillight wall. First, I laid the back seat flat and loaded the hatchback full of the store bundles, and then went to deliver all of the stores in Cobden to make space in the car for the rest of the run. Cobden Sundries, Cobden Food Market, the store where Bonnie Helferty's flower shop is now, The Northway (17 West now), and Olmstead's Highway Variety. That got rid of pretty well the entire hatchback bay's worth of papers. Then it was back to Mr. Gas and reload. The hatchback bay was completely full up to the windows and the entire back seat to the same level. Then it was head out to the first box. I hated Saturdays. The papers were big and messy and sometimes barely fit in the boxes. I hated Saturday because it slowed me down so much. No flying by boxes faster than most people can bicycle.

It very quickly became apparent that the load was too much for my J2000. It sagged in the rear end with the weight, and bottomed out on the bumps. To remedy that, I bought a set of Monroe air shocks and installed them. What a difference. Before heading out on the route Saturday morning, I pumped them up to 30 pounds, I think it was. I'd go, make the Cobden store drops, reload, then head out on the route. There were store bundles to drop in Pinewood Park, Ranger's in Haley Station, and JR's Country Store and Pete and Judy's at the Four Corners. Once I took the bundles in to Pete and Judy's, I let the air out of the shocks to soften the ride for the rest of the route. There was a Schrader valve (the same as for any tire) for the air shocks just behind the rear wheel well for the left tire. I would stick a key in it and let the rear end down to a predetermined height above the tire, and that was the level the car stayed at until next Saturday. At the end of the Saturday run, I flipped the back seat back into place and loaded the bundles in the back seat itself to keep the much smaller bundles close at hand the rest of the week. That also created a handy bay we'll get to in just a moment.

The newspapers came in bundles, wrapped with plain paper on the top and the bottom for some protection from the elements and in the delivery trucks. The bundles were held together by a white nylon binder strap. Dick always carried a knife to cut them open so I did too. One morning, as Route Supervisor, Garry went with me to check on the condition of my boxes, and did the passenger side papers. Deftly, he flipped over the first bundle, gripped the ear of the overlap of the binder strap, and ripped it open. No tool required. That's the way I did it from then on, and how I open any tractor parts boxes that come with a strap to this day. He taught me something I still employ almost 40 years later without saying a word and he may have never even known it.

As I reached my right arm and hand over the front seat into the back for a new bundle when I needed it, I would flop it into the front passenger seat, flip it over, grab the bundle tab, rip it open, then quickly roll the binder strap up in both hands, wrap the paper bundle cover around it in a ball, and toss it over my shoulder past the back seat into the hatch. The binders were almost unmanageable any other way. They sprung around loose and were hard to get a hold of when I wanted to. By nesting them in a ball of paper, they became much easier to deal with. By Saturday morning, the hatch area would be completely full of the balls of covers and binders. I would back up to the burn barrel in our backyard at the farm, open the hatchback, and throw all the paper balls in it, light it, and cover it with a spark guard. Then I'd pump the air shocks up for the Saturday run and head out.

On Saturdays I flung the cover and binder balls over my shoulder into the hatch bay with the paper bundles themselves. At the end of the Saturday run, when I flipped the back seat back up, the cover and binder balls for that day went with them.

The 1982 J2000 was given the exact same style nose and grille as a 1977 or 1978 Firebird (think: Smokey and the Bandit), so it looked cool. As one guy commented on a vintage J2000 commercial on Youtube, "I'm a Buick guy. But Pontiac did the best front end on the early "J" platform. It screamed "Pontiac"!" Yeah, it was Pontiac through and through. The pictures here are stock ones, of course, but they represent my car very well. The interior of mine was nicer with its cool checkered upholstery.

As I said at the beginning, a paper route is an absolute killer on brakes. A full four corner brake job was almost a month's pay, and I needed about three or four sets of front ones a year. One of my own self imposed handicaps has always been I was - and still am - of the mindset that anything I've never done before is some kind of voodoo; only for other people. As a farmboy, I certainly was well acquainted with ratchets and wrenches, but I never had anything to do with hydraulic brakes. Because of the 'licensed mechanic' nature of brake work, and the extreme danger of a brake failure, I thought brake work was beyond me. And at over 200 stops (well, slow downs) a morning, nobody needed brakes more than I did.

Al Cole came to the rescue for me there. When he was up from Ameliasburg at his Grampa Cole's on the home farm, I paid him as a licensed Ford mechanic to put a set of front brake shoes in my J2000. He told me, "Danny, you don't need to be paying me to do this for you. You can do it yourself. It'd be simple for a guy like you". He meant a fellow farmboy. "I'll show you. Just watch me while I do it". He went on to show me the in's and out's of a brake job and it was nowhere near the voodoo my self-sabotaging mind made it out to be to me. That one evening, Al set me up to save thousands of dollars on brake jobs.

I bought the few tools I needed that I didn't have, and set up our air compressor station at the back of the house into an Indy 500 Pit Stop Brake Repair Station. If I burned through a set of brakes on the route, our farm was exactly halfway around the route. I mean within a hundred meters. I could nurse my way on the last boxes with the parking brake and make it home. Brake pads weren't as good in those days and could suddenly deteriorate due to heat buildup. I'd pull in, throw a 3/4" 4x8 sheet of plywood down, drive onto it, and jack up the one corner with a trolley jack. Inside the air compressor hut on the doors were all my brake tools. I'd grab the impact wrench and the 3/4" socket, zip the lug nuts off, and pull the wheel and tire off. Then, I grabbed the special bar I kept for retracting the brake caliper, inserted in the caliper and brake rotor, and pry the caliper back. A ratchet and 14 MM socket removed the caliper. Knock the worn pads out with the end of the ratchet, and stick the new ones in that were always sitting in a box in the compressor hut. Set the caliper back over the rotor, replace the caliper bolts, reinstall the wheel and tire, and drop the jack. Then rinse and repeat on the other side. I had it down to a 15 minute pit stop for a front brake pad replacement and back on the road. Because I was no longer paying labour, which is the largest portion of a brake job, I didn't have to baby the brakes anymore. I could fly and not worry about the expense of a brake job. There was a bit of a payback in that, if I wasn't coming to a virtually complete stop like Dick, I wasn't building up as much heat either. But, I was for sure driving faster between boxes, so I guess it sort of roughly evened out. A lot faster, if I'm to be honest. There was a blank area on the Bromley Line and the Fourth Line where I made some time at over 80 MPH. There, now I'm being fully truthful. Don't hold it against me. I was young and dumb. Now I'm just dumb. And more near sighted. And not as strong. And don't move as fast. You know what? Forget it. I'm just depressing myself.

Anyway...

I bought brake pads ahead of time when they were on sale at Canadian Tire. I always bought the premium semi-metallic pads for the heavy duty of rural delivery, and the extreme duty of doing it at speed. Front brakes are 70 percent of your braking. I could get away without rears if I had to, but they were connected to that convenient handle beside me which allowed bootlegger's turns at dead ends or setting up drifts through corners so I didn't have to slow down. I was extremely practiced and proficient at bootlegger's turns, drifts, and J-turns (or 'Rockford Turns'; how James Garner made his getaways in his gold Firebird Esprit in 'The Rockford Files'). Dick would have had a fit! Just lost his ever-lovin' mind altogether.

I have done all my brakes on all my vehicles ever since and enjoy the job.

That J2000 wasn't only my 'route buggy', it was also my personal car until I got my 1985 Firebird SE, and I took very good care of it. Cory, Al, Perry Scobie, and the Mackay boys would all remember it.

The reputation those cars got is only from snooty Road & Track and Car and Driver writers. I'd like to see their stupid Porsche's and Jaguar's and Aston Martins' stand up to the day in day out abuse that J2000 did. It required nothing but brake jobs and some front suspension work and an alternator rebuild the entire time I had it. And the overloader air shocks, of course.

Alas, nothing lasts forever.