Paperboy reaches 10 million delivery’s

Eric Smith is dedicated. How so? He delivers The Chronicle (a newspaper), roughly 1,000 issues every morning in the Berkeley hills. Smith, who turns 65 next month, has delivered papers seven days a week, 365 days a year for the past 28 years -- without a day off. That works out to about 10 million deliveries.

"It is labor intensive and detail intensive,'' Smith says. "You've got to put your heart and soul into it.''

He has. And that is why it is such a laugh that a couple of cheap scam artists thought they could fool his customers with a Christmas card, seeking holiday tips.

They slipped fake cards -- complete with their home addresses -- into the papers of several of his customers last week after Smith delivered them, hoping no one would notice.

Here's the problem. Subscribers up on Grizzly Peak Boulevard know their newspaper carrier. Their newspaper carrier is a friend of theirs. And these guys were not their newspaper carrier.

Frankly, in the annals of crime, you'd have to say that these two are unlikely to go down as criminal masterminds. For starters, just as a general rule, you don't want to provide your address at the scene of the crime.

Second, if you are going to rip someone off, you might be better off not to pretend to be taking the place of one of the icons of the neighborhood.

I don't want to tip anybody off or anything, but if the guys who tried to pull this Grinch-like trick are reading along, this would be a good time to make a run for it. The police have been notified, and because you left your addresses -- one in Pinole and one in Richmond -- on the back of the card, I'm guessing it won't be that hard to locate you.

Eric Smith only drives convertibles on his route. "I can throw 360 degrees,'' he says. "For a while, I was putting the top up and taking it down, but then I saw these little cracks appearing so I thought I just better leave the top down.''

Since becoming a newspaper deliveryman more than four decades ago, Smith has taken only one break.

"I started, full time, on this route in 1964,'' he says. "At one point, I had an appendix about to burst, so I had to take some time off. I left the day Elvis Presley died (Aug. 17, 1977) and I came back on Dec. 19, 1977.''

He's got the whole system down to a science.

Smith has a 3-million candlepower spotlight to search out the rare paper that lands in the bushes, and one of those reach-and-grab arm extensions to pull papers out from under cars. "I throw with both hands,'' he says.

"Somebody once told me they saw me with three papers in the air at the same time.''

And then, of course, there was that magical Fourth of July when there was an unusually small newspaper and the calm conditions were perfect for paper pitching.

"I got about halfway through and I thought, things are going swimmingly,'' Smith says. "I did the whole thing in one hour and 59 minutes. But if I'd known I was going for a record, I could have had it down to 1:45 at least.''

It hasn't been a bad life, Smith figures. He's put his two kids through St. Mary's, a private high school, and his daughter just graduated from UC Santa Cruz. His dad, who started the route in 1952, bought a house in Berkeley in the '50s, and his son still lives there.

He says his plan is to throw papers "until I am 100 or die, whichever comes first.'' And that will be the end of the line. Smith says he doubts his son, Hiroshi, 24, will take over.

"He hasn't decided what he wants to do,'' Smith says. "But it isn't this.''
Oh, and Smith wants his customers to know that his Christmas cards will be going out this weekend. Take a moment and give something up for a guy who loves his job.

Wow. I didn’t know a columnist from San Francisco Gate could write so long about something so simple- a guy who just delivers newspapers. On the contrary, it is refreshing to hear about a great person who loves their job/life. I guess between the homicides/murders/scams stories you could say it’s instances like this that make the news ‘readable’ each day. Good stuff Eric Smith. Rock on man. Article here.