It’s been nearly three decades since Sadie Landry delivered a newspaper and yet there are still nights when the bad dreams come.

“I’m out delivering and I can’t remember where the paper goes,” Landry says of those dreams. “I can’t remember who gets the paper and where it goes. I’m 41 years old and I still have those dreams.”

It’s hardly a surprise that newspaper delivery has become part of Landry’s psychological makeup – she slung papers for seven years, after all, and never once called out sick or left her 65 to 75 customers in the lurch.

When she started working her route, in the neighborhoods behind Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, Landry had it easy. She was delivering the Sun Journal’s afternoon paper and she had a brother and a sister along to help her out.

That changed when the newspaper got rid of the afternoon paper. If she wanted to keep her job, Landry would have to start getting up early – extremely early, in fact, and in all sorts of weather.

That kind of gig isn’t for everyone.

“When they went to mornings, my brother and sister really couldn’t handle it,” Landry says. “I ended up with like half the neighborhood back there and I had it until I graduated from high school. I didn’t get to sleep much or party with my friends very late.”

Back in those days, a lot of kids had paper routes, but not many of them hung on for seven years. To this day, if you go into that neighborhood – some call it Hospital Hill, others the Back Bay – you’ll find plenty of old-timers who remember the little girl – Sadie was just 11 when she started – who so faithfully delivered their morning papers.

As it happens, there were a few things that made Landry stand out.

“I had two great Danes that I would take with me,” Landry says. “I just let them run loose. Nobody ever said anything because I was this young girl and I had a paper route all by myself. The only thing that would stink is when they would follow me up into an apartment house hallway. It was like 5 o’clock in the morning and I had these two big Danes and trying to be quiet. That was rough.”

Except for Sundays when her father would drive her, Landry had to lug up to 75 papers each day along her route. She managed it through experimentation and ingenuity.

“In the movies you see everyone riding on a bike with their paper bags,” Landry says. “It just never worked for me. “I could never get the bag to not rub on the tires.

“There were some really hard mornings,” she says. “I had a kind of bag-lady cart. That’s how I started. Then I went to this really cool cart where it was like a double-wide milk crate. It had two wheels so it was like a wagon and it had a handle. I could put my papers in there and I could just lift it up, walk and stop. In the wintertime I used sleds. I had like a plastic toboggan sled. The sleds were very helpful.”

Like any paper carrier who did time on early morning streets, Landry has her vivid memories. Some are funny, some are harrowing, some are downright frightening.

“I remember one morning I had fallen,” Landry recalls. “I took a really hard spill on ice and got hurt. I remember just laying there crying and thinking nobody’s going to find me. Nobody’s gonna hear me. Nobody cares. Another time, it was just so cold – we were right on the river so it was really windy, too. I remember I would just try to hunker down in people’s hallways and try to warm up before heading back out.”

Paper carriers have been known to thwart burglars, call in fires and come to the aid of the injured when no one else was around. Landry, too, had her brush with heroics; like the time some fool in a hurry nearly lost their car to gravity and to the Androscoggin River just down the hill from Avon Street.

“Someone had just parked their car on the side of the road and they didn’t put it in park,” Landry recalls. “It started rolling. There’s this really steep drop from Winter Street down to Avon. The car was rolling toward that drop.”

Bear in mind that Sadie was just 13 at the time and knew next to nothing about the mechanics of cars.

“I was just a kid,” she says, “I didn’t even know how to drive. First I just got behind the car and tried to stop it from rolling (backward). Then I opened the door, I got in and I put my foot on the brake and I finally was able to stop it. That was actually really scary. Then I didn’t know what to do. Then I didn’t know whether to put it into park or whatever.”

She eventually got the car stopped long enough to fetch its absent-minded owner from a nearby apartment. With that business taken care of, she went on her way, faithfully finishing her route as she would do for the next five years. Neither runaway cars, nor the harsh cold and icy sidewalks of winter could stay Sadie Landry from the swift completion of her appointed rounds.

These days, Landry is a karate instructor and part owner of Pelletier’s Karate Academy in Lewiston. There’s no doubt, she says, that the things she learned on her paper route have carried over into her adult life.

“I had that paper route during the most formative years of my life. I carried away so much,” she says. “I took from that an appreciation for sunny days – until you’ve been outside in a blizzard, pouring rain, freezing cold you truly can’t appreciate a warm summer morning.

“I had a lot of elderly people on my paper route and a lot of times they would be confused as if they had paid me or not and would want to pay me more than they owed,” she says. “I honestly can say I never cheated one person on my route. And to this day I’d like to think that I still carry that type of integrity with me. No matter what my commitment or responsibility is, I show up. My newspapers were delivered on time every day. And today I know that I am accountable and reliable. I am as dedicated and disciplined to the martial arts as I was to my route.”

Copy the Story Link