Are you old enough to remember paperboys? I am. So I smile when I look at today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1952 in honor of America’s newspaper boys. Or as the stamp say, it’s “in recognition of the important service rendered their communities and their nation.”

The stamp itself merits a closer look. The foreground shows a stereotypical white youth holds a newspaper bag that has the phrase “Busy Boys – Better Boys” along with a massive hand holding a torch that says “Free Enterprise.” The background is vaguely suburban, though the houses look more like those found near village centers. Moreover, they are at a density that might not be allowed under the zoning codes in many suburban locales. In those places, houses are so far apart that it’s almost impossible to delivery their papers by bicycle – if anyone living in those new houses still gets a hard copy of their daily newspaper.

But at one time the overwhelming majority of people got papers and got them delivered by paper boys. And, apparently, the first paperboy was hired on September 4, 1833 by Benjamin Day, publisher of the New York Sun newspaper, who had run an ad stating “a number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy to sell again.” Although Day was looking for adults, 10-year-old Barney Flaherty went to the Sun to apply. Impressed by the boy’s excitement for the job, Day hired him (or rather gave him the right to buy papers at a discount and sell them for face value.).

I wonder if Day also thought he could pay boys less and treat them worse than adults. Regardless, boys soon dominated the sale of newspapers in New York City (and elsewhere). And within a few decades, the city’s newsboys mounted several strikes, notably the Newsboys Strike of 1899 which forced a change in the way leading papers paid the boys. The strike was the subject of “Newsies,” a 1992 film that was particularly loathed in my family because one of my then-young daughters played it incessantly, especially in the morning when it served as her interminable alarm because she was always slow to get up. (The film begat a Broadway musical that ran from 2012 until 2015.)

The stamp doesn’t feature the newsboys who hawked papers but rather the stereotypical suburban newspaper boy, who delivered papers, particularly the afternoon papers that once were part of every metro region’s newspaper ecosystem. I didn’t have a route myself, but I sometimes helped my friend JP Dunn out, when he (for whatever reason) sometimes took over his brother’s route delivering the Newark Evening News.

However, my first “job” was a short stint as the newspaper boy in Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey during the summer of 1972. Every morning and every afternoon I would load a pile of papers onto an old wheelchair and go all over the hospital – including, I believe into the isolation ward – selling papers room-to-room. It was a fascinating and educational experience. I remember looking at headlines about the Watergate break-in and wondering what they meant. I remember following broadcasts of the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky chess matches that were on in many patients’ rooms. I remember how some people trusted me so much that they told me to just take money out of their wallet if they were asleep. And I remember how one imperious doctor would just take (i.e. steal) a paper telling me (falsely) that he had an arrangement with the man I was working for. And I remember figuring out that my boss man was cheating me by undercounting the number of newspapers I returned at the end of the day. Still, it was fun for a while, though I quit when I realized that it wouldn’t work for me once school started.

JP Dunn, his brother, and I weren’t alone. As late as 1980 children accounted for about 90 percent of all carriers of daily newspapers, according to the Newspaper Association of America. There’s even a Newspapers Carriers Hall of Fame, whose members include three former presidents (Hoover, Eisenhower, and Truman) and five current or former Supreme Court justices (Burger, Clark, Douglas, Roberts, and Warren), as well as a host of other notable Americans including Isaac Asimov, Tom Brokaw, Warren Buffet, Carl Sandburg, Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson, and John Wayne.

Many of these people have spoken about the lessons they learned about business and people as newspaper boys. Henry Petroski, a former paperboy who went on to become a well-known professor of civil engineering and history at Duke, for example wrote a whole memoir titled “Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer.” In the book, Petroski describes learning from others techniques for folding large Sunday papers and then observes: “The techniques of stuffing, like Teflon, may have been discovered by accident” and then honed by different paperboys over the years. “…Did noting such evolutionary developments in basically technological processes, done first when I was a paperboy later contribute to my thinking about engineering, design, invention, and the evolutions of artifacts, generally. I expect it probably did….Delivering papers was full of frustration, as is all technology, is life. But frustration and disappointment with things as they are is the essence of invention and progress.”

Times, of course, have changed. Afternoon papers disappeared followed by many print newspapers (and the ones that survived sell fewer hard copies). Child labor laws make it harder to recruit paperboys, particularly for early morning routes in increasingly dispersed suburbs where papers are more efficiently delivered by cars, often driven by immigrants, who like the paperboys of 19th century New York probably are underpaid and exploited. As a result, by the mid 2000s, less than 20 percent of papers were delivered by children (I couldn’t find an up-to-date figure but I suspect it’s even lower today).

I doubt, however, that we’ll soon see a stamp showing someone throwing a paper from a car in the early morning hours or even someone pressing a button to “deliver” new content to an online website.

Be safe, stay well, fight for justice (even in the face of frustration and disappointment) and work for peace.