I throw these columns out there and never know what might happen. In late April I opened one on my 33rd anniversary in newspapers with a few paragraphs about old-time newsboys, the kids who stood on corners with a stack of papers for sale and shouted out headlines.
Did we have any local newsboys? I doubted it.
Yet the next day I heard from a man who sold newspapers on the corner of Ontario’s Holt Boulevard and Euclid Avenue in 1940. And then what happened? I still can’t believe it myself.
I heard from a second man who sold newspapers on the corner of Holt and Euclid in 1940.
Dock Parnell and J.T. Waller say they never met. They worked opposite corners: Parnell on the northeast, Waller on the southwest.
If these were different times, I’d have invited the two men, both 90, to meet up with me at that intersection, and maybe try to sell a few newspapers. But for now, let me just share their stories.
Parnell was 11 when he started selling papers. “You were supposed to be 12,” he said, “but I was big for my age and the agent didn’t really care.”
Each Sunday at 7:30 a.m. Parnell would go to the distributor’s house with a four-wheeled wooden wagon, painted bright red with the Los Angeles Times logo on the side, and load it up with the morning Times and the afternoon Examiner. Then he’d trundle down to his spot.
Holt was then named A Street, which was also Highway 99, a main artery between L.A. and Palm Springs in that pre-freeway era. So the street saw a lot of out-of-town traffic. Crucially, the intersection had a traffic signal.
“It was the best spot in town, not only because line-hauling trucks had to slow down or stop, but so did people returning early to the L.A. area from Palm Springs,” Parnell said.
Most of his sales were to motorists, not pedestrians.
“I got pretty good at timing the street light. I would often walk back east on the street a-ways with both papers so I could then run alongside and jump up on the step of the trucks to make my pitch to the occupants before they had to stop for the light,” Parnell recalled.
A few times Parnell tried to mimic the big-city newsboys by calling out, “Get your paper here! Times and Examiner!” That was a bust. “There were so few people on the street of our little city at that time that it wasn’t worth the effort,” Parnell said.
Parnell made a couple of cents on each sale, decent money during the Depression for a kid. He was proud to always have money in his pocket.
Now and then he had to fight newcomers for his spot, but he was a big kid and stood his ground. Usually it was kids from the southwest corner of the intersection trying to muscle in. His turf on the northeast corner was more lucrative, he said: “Who drove east on an early Sunday morning out of Ontario?”
J.T. Waller can tell us. He was selling the Sunday Times on the southwest corner in 1940-41. He recalled that his older brother, Dewitt, sold the Examiner on the northeast corner, so maybe his stint and Parnell’s didn’t overlap.
Because Waller always sold out earlier than his brother, Walter thought his southwest corner was superior.
“That was the ‘hot’ corner, since I got all of the traffic coming from Hollywood and other towns west, and there were many movie stars, both male and female, on the road on their way to Palm Springs,” Waller recalled. “My all-time favorite customer was Clark Gable. He would pull up in his ‘special’ Buick and I always sold him a paper, either at the stop sign or at the Ford Lunch.”
The traffic signal had wooden blades, one for stop, one for go, that would go up or down, accompanied by a bell signaling the change.
“I would step in between the row of cars and sell papers until I heard the ‘bong’ of the light changing and exit quickly to the sidewalk,” Waller said. There, he’d grab another bunch of papers and wait for the next stop signal.
When the traffic died down, he’d tote his remaining papers across Euclid to Ford Lunch, the diner on the southeast corner. Owner Frank Hobart let him walk through the restaurant quietly and sell papers to anyone who wanted one. Some were regulars who waited until they got to downtown Ontario to buy a paper from him, and if they’d missed him at the corner, they’d get one from him over breakfast.
Coincidentally enough, Parnell’s dad, Pat, was Ford Lunch’s chef. That’s a small town for you.
Waller’s biggest day was Dec. 7, 1941, a Sunday, with special editions. After selling out on his corner, he got more papers from the distributor, then visited neighborhoods south of A Street. He walked in the middle of the streets, shouting: “Extra, extra! Japs bomb Pearl Harbor!”
“Doors would open and it seemed like everyone wanted a paper, which was 10 cents,” Waller said. Some gave him a quarter and told him to keep the change.
Oscar Arnold, the chairman and CEO of First National Bank on the southwest corner of Holt and Euclid, was a steady customer. Waller made sure to be ready on Sunday mornings when Arnold walked by on his way to Ford Lunch.
“He always gave me a $1 bill and said to keep the change,” Waller said. “Since the paper only cost 10 cents, that meant that I received a 90-cent tip, which was the equivalent of selling 45 papers, since I got two cents per paper for my work.”
My thanks to Waller and Parnell for chiming in with their two cents — and for still reading a newspaper.
Valley Vignette
Dave Masterson led Chaffey High’s acclaimed theater program in Ontario for 25 years, mounting student musicals on the Gardiner Spring Auditorium stage of near-professional quality. When he retired in May, after 42 years of teaching, a formal party was out. But he was feted anyway as a “happy retirement” banner was placed outside his house, a caravan of well-wishers drove by and a student band performed in his yard.
David Allen performs in your newspaper Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
