(Publisher’s note: Is it officially stealing if you steal from yourself, or copyright infringement when you infringe upon yourself? I’m not quite sure. But on this Labor Day weekend, I am rerunning a column that I ran on a previous Labor Day weekend. I mean, “Seinfeld” reruns are as popular — maybe more so — than when they ran originally, no? Also, it’s been such a busy week at 218 Genesee St. that I honestly haven’t had time to write a fresh “Pub Chat.” So I hope you’ll indulge me and enjoy the rerun, edited down just a tad from the original).
On Labor Day weekend I wonder if you remember your first job?
I sure do mine. It had to do with newspapers — geez, imagine that. Only it was delivering them, not writing for them. I was in ninth grade, and my buddy Ken and I delivered the Syracuse newspapers in our Baldwinsville neighborhood.
Most memorable to me — besides going door to door collecting weekly payments from customers ... remember that? — was one particularly rainy Sunday morning. We were worried that lugging the papers in our cloth bags would turn them into waterlogged slop, so we rigged up a contraption of which we were quite proud. Ken’s father had a seed spreader, so we plopped 50 or so papers into that baby, covered it with a tarp and went porch to porch with it, peeling one bone-dry paper after........