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A Former Paperboy: Read All About Him

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By WILLIS RIGSBY

Special to the Tribune

Published: December 7, 2008

It wasn't easy to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning to deliver The Tampa Morning Tribune during the Depression. I and two of my brothers would ride our bicycles to get our papers at the gas station across from Milian's Restaurant at Florida and Lake avenues in Tampa, where subscription manager Floyd Gonder counted out copies to us.

We delivered in the rain, the heat, the cold - even during a bad storm. The paper cost 25 cents a week, of which the carriers got 5 cents. My brothers and I gave some of our money to our mother; our parents had divorced in 1928, and my mother was raising us four boys with little or no help from our father.

Even though we gave her most of our money, we still had enough left over to take a girlfriend to the Garden Theater on Nebraska Avenue.

The Depression years were hard, with few jobs and little money. Although my mother had a job with the Works Progress Administration, we moved often - every time the rent came due. The house we lived in the longest was on Plymouth Court, across from Woodlawn Cemetery.

My brothers - the oldest, S.A., and the two youngest, Paul and Ellis - and I would go to Columbus bakery, where we got day-old bread for free. If they had cinnamon rolls, we ate them on the spot and then hurried over to the dairy on Florida Avenue to wash them down with milk. If we brought our own containers, we could get free skim milk at the dairy.

We got fruit and vegetables at a produce market, where they were surrounded by a metal cage after hours. We could reach in with a stick and usually liberate a few samples.

Other treats came to us through our paper routes. Sometimes on our route, we would meet with the Florida Dairy milkman and trade him a paper for a pint of milk. One of my subscribers lived in an apartment, and I would slide the paper under the door right next to his bed. All he had to do was lean over to get it.

He returned the favor one week by taping money to a card, which he left sticking partway under the door.

At Christmastime, I would get a jar of guava jelly from one customer, a container of honey from another. One man gave me a roll of nickels - that was great!

Life was not all work and school.

My brothers and our friends spent happy hours playing and exploring along the Hillsborough River. One of my friends, looking back, commented, "The Lord surely looked after us." I agreed - poisonous water moccasins hung out along the river, too.

As we got older, we attended Jefferson Junior High School and then Hillsborough High on North Central Avenue. The only two schools with football teams were Hillsborough and Plant High in South Tampa. The big game between the rivals was always held on Thanksgiving Day at Old Phillips Field, now part of the University of Tampa.

On that morning, we would meet at school and put red and black streamers on our cars, along with signs that read "Beat Plant."

Those happy rivalries would end all too soon as the world went to war.

After we finally left the Depression behind and graduated from high school, my brothers and I all enlisted in the military. S.A. served in the Air Force in the South Pacific, I was in the Army in the United States, Paul went to Germany, and Ellis served in the Navy.

All of us managed to come home safely.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Willis Rigsby, 88, came to Tampa when he was 5. After serving in the military, he worked for 25 years at a phosphate plant in Gibsonton. He went on to become an ordained Methodist minister and was a pastor at six North Florida churches and the former Interbay United Methodist Church in Tampa. He and his wife, Louell, had three children and had been married for 65 years when she died in October.

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