After a quarter of a century, Pat’s rest is tradition’s loss

Pat Meyers grew up on a Rockford, Wash., farm. She grew up on chores and what they taught her about the ways of early morning. She grew into a woman, now 68, who has delivered newspapers for 25 years, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Pat’s alarm has been set for 2 a.m. since Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Tuesday, she’ll retire from her newspaper job. In the announcement letter she left with her 200-plus customers, Pat wrote, “Many thanks to all who leave the porch lights on for me when I deliver each morning.”

When I called Pat and asked to join her on her paper route Friday, she spared me the earliest and coldest part of it by instructing me to meet her two hours into the route, at 5 a.m., inside the doors of the Waterford on South Hill.

She talked memories as she rolled her newspaper cart down quiet hallways of the retirement complex, rolling us into the past. Her four sons all had paper routes in the ‘70s, in the days of two newspapers, in the days when young boys and girls, on bikes and on foot, flung newspapers onto porches. Now, carriers are required to have driver’s licenses. Some are new immigrants, learning the early-morning ways of their new communities.

Pat took over her youngest son’s route in the fall of 1980. She walked the South Hill route, dodging errant dogs. She was bitten only once. She hid a few times in the bushes, suspicious of random, roaming men. She switched to a car when dispatchers no longer dropped newspapers off in carriers’ driveways.

She watched as retirement complexes emerged from South Hill swamplands. She watched as fitness crazes filled early-morning streets with joggers and walkers. Now she sees young people on skateboards at 4 a.m. Have they been up all night? She’s not sure.

Pat’s upper arms are strong. Her hands are arthritis-free. She credits the daily lifting and folding of newspapers. She is free of much bitterness, too, though her life has been hard and filled with manual labor.

She’s been a wife for 48 years, a mother to five children, grandmother to seven, and now she raises her 4-year-old grandson full time. For much of the past 25 years, she also worked second jobs.

“At my age, I have no business doing this,” Pat says. “I will miss it though.”

Her customers grieve. They have been gifting her all week. One placed $100 within a thank-you note. Another, Robert Barcus, wrote me in an e-mail: “At our house she leaves the paper upended against the bottom of our front door so that it falls inside when the door is opened.”

In one Waterford hallway, a nurse’s aide, Geof Fanning, who grew up in the area, told me that his 80-year-old father still says: “Tell Pat hello. She was the best carrier we ever had.”

We journalists who toil each day in labors of the mind rarely glimpse the labors of the body required to deliver our words, our photographs, our designs. It seems a sacred circle. We finish most of our daily work for 5 p.m. deadlines, and by 5 a.m., 559 newspaper carriers are delivering that work. All morning Friday, Pat tucked Today sections into front sections, a ritual of care and grace.

Someday, the news may be delivered solely by Internet carriers. As Pat says, “I don’t think there will be many 25-year carriers in the future.”

Alas, they will never know the early-morning secrets that Pat possesses. The way the stars wink at her in solidarity. The aroma of flowers before traffic exhaust overpowers their smell. The life passages in each home — birth and death and everything in between.

Pat carried public messages into private lives for a quarter of a century. Now, she retires. A rest for her, a loss for the rest who depended on her for this each day.