By Andrew Macdonald
Now elected as Nova Scotia Premier-designate, Progressive Conservative leader Tim Houston joins a rare group of premiers of the province who were paperboys long ago in their youth.
Houston’s first job as a teen was delivering the daily news to dedicated news junkies while growing up in a military family in Fairview. He delivered the defunct tabloid, the Halifax Daily News.
“I had a paper route, flyer deliveries. I worked at McDonald’s up on Lacewood, that was my first job. I had odd jobs in the summer. My grandparents were landlords for an apartment building and townhouse complex, so I did a bit of vacuuming, window washing in the buildings with my grandparents for some pocket money”, Houston previously told The Notebook.
“All of those things are part of what makes us what we are”, he says.
PC leader Tim Houston with his Chester-St. Margaret’s candidate Danielle Barkhouse. Houston led a surprise majority victory in the NS election and Barkhouse narrowly won her seat. (The Notebook photo).
Houston had the paper route in 1983-85 and had up to 70 customers. “You are digging deep now, man”, he chuckles about his early life history.
“It’s a part of your upbringing. My friends were all from Fairview, some moved away and some are still there. It’s a place when I drive the streets I have memories of things that happened, places – they are happy childhood memories”, he says of his upbringing in Fairview, a burb of the City of Halifax.
Last year, I carried a news article on a former premier of NS, who began his teenaged entrepreneurial ways as a Sydney Post paperboy.
That was Honest Its John Buchanan, who in 1944 in his hometown of Sydney served as a paperboy – opening up his long-held adult interest in all things related to NS Public Affairs.
Alexa McDonough, blue jacket, and Dan O’Connor at the February 2020 NS NDP Convention listening to Margie MacDonald to whom they had presented a lifetime membership. “We haven’t aged a bit!!” quips O’Connor.
But, as Dan O’Connor writes former NDP premier Darrell Dexter also had a paper route, this former premier even had an Extra! Extra! street corner, flogging the news.
Here’ is O’Connor’s note to The Notebook, last summer:
“Your piece on people who delivered newspapers in their youth reminded me that former premier Darrell Dexter is among them.
“His father was a sheet metal worker and the family lived in the North End of Halifax when there was work at the shipyard.
“Darrell attended Bloomfield School.
“Darrell had combined two routes -his own and a second route that he took on when a friend left.
“Darrell also had a corner (yes, they existed in those days). The corner of Almon and Agricola. After he did the deliveries he would sell the rest of the papers on the corner.
“I think the Herald called those spots a “stand” and as I heard the story, they were allocated in much the same way as a delivery route.
If you know of someone in politics or business who once spent young formative years as a paperboy or papergirl, please hit the Letter to Editor button, and in a future Notebook edition, we will tell their story.
The other day a Notebook reader suggested a neat future column: Today’s business leaders who began their money careers delivering newspapers.
“I think it would be surprising just who started their business career that way,” the reader tells me, adding, “I, too, was a vendor of the Halifax Herald when I was in public and high school. A good training for us all. It might make an interesting article to identify kids like us who started as paperboys and where are they now.
“I suspect there’re many, many entrepreneurs in our province who started with the Herald. Could be an interesting read.”
And so The Notebook has its marching orders to research and dig about the business landscape to talk to modern-day titans on their experiences as a paperboy — or papergirls.
It’s a tough assignment to track down paperboys, so The Notebook is asking our readers to let us know of kids who once — perhaps decades ago — delivered newspapers. Hit the Letter to Editor button to give us names, and we will talk to these former paperboys.
My teenage jobs in the 1980s
I, too, was a Halifax Herald paperboy although I was supposed to become a third-generation road builder in my family firm, a Maritime-wide entity, that was founded by my grandfather in 1925, back when horses were used to drag heavy machinery to build dirt roads,
John Buchanan was a paperboy in 1944 in his native Sydney, delivering the Sydney Post. He defeated Gerald Regan in 1978. He was premier from 1978-1990. (Halifax Herald photo).
In my teens, I was fortunate enough to have a Halifax Herald paper route. I had 100 customers in Antigonish while I went from grade 8 to grade 12, from 1982 to 1986. I’d wake up at 6 a.m. daily, and finish delivering that day’s Chronicle-Herald by 8 a.m.
And as a teenaged paperboy, I found myself devouring the political journalism stories of then talented legislative journalists at the Herald. I would study the news articles from journalists like Jim Meek, Jim Vibert, Brian Ward and Allan Jeffers.
Those Herald writers cemented my desire to become a political journalist, just like them.
Today, Vibert is back at the Halifax Herald, Meek is a lobbyist who continues to file an opinion column to the Herald, and Ward is now a senior newsroom executive at that paper, entering his 40th year at the paper.
As for Allan Jeffers, he is now making a mint in Houston as a spokesman for ExxonMobil. It pays a handsome salary — and he is a new mansion dweller in Chester Back Harbour.
Two years ago, Jeffers hired top realtor Carolyn Davis Stewart and bought a circa $800,000 Chester real estate pile. Another top realtor, Rick Foster, had the actual listing.
Jeffers subsequently knocked down the structure, and over the last year has built a circa $1 million new cottage on the Back Harbour lot, with its own dock. It was built by Chester carpenter, Crossridge’s Barry Taylor.
While still in my teens, I also worked for dad’s road-building entity. In 1987, that saw me as a labourer working at the Port Hawkesbury Airport. The job that year was installing a federal government navigational aid system for pilots.
Also, in 1988, I was also a labourer when my late dad won the contract to extend the Trenton Airport, and it grew to a 5,000-foot runway.
Just as Liberal political titan Allan J. MacEachen built his own Port Hawkesbury airport in his own Cape Breton riding, the 1988 expansion of the Trenton airport so it could accommodate Challenger & Lear executive jets was done via then Mulroney powerful cabinet minister, Elmer MacKay.
Trenton was part of MacKay’s riding in Central Nova.
In a recent article, I called the Trenton airport ‘The Elmer MacKay International Airport’. It is now owned by the Sobeys family.
Brian Mulroney and even Bill Clinton in recent years have touched down at Trenton when they were heading to speaking engagements at Antigonish’s St. Francis Xavier University.
So if you know of a modern-day business leader, who delivered newspapers as a kid eons ago via the Letter to Editor button found below this article.
