100 years ago in Eastern Washington: Dispatches from a newspaper delivery truck driver on the Palouse

A reporter for The Spokesman-Review rode along with a newspaper delivery truck driver to explain how folks in Colfax, Walla Walla and points in between got their Sunday paper delivered in time for breakfast.

“It was 12:40 a.m. when Jack stepped on the starter of his truck (an REO Speedwagon),” said the story. “… For two miles, or so the road is paved and then the paving ends in hard, smooth gravel and the long climb is made out of the Latah Creek ravine.”

Here are a few of the trip’s highlights:

• In Spangle, the town’s night patrolman helped lift bundles of newspapers off the truck.
• In Plaza, “the stop there was so brief that the truck did not stop moving forward at all, merely slowing down.”
• Near Steptoe Butte, the truck passed tourist autos on the side of the road, with youngsters sleeping on the car seats, adults on blankets on the ground.
• The truck driver paused for coffee in Colfax at an all-night diner, where the waiter told him that people had been “a-partying here all night.”
• The Hastings brothers presided over the ferryboat, a flat-bottomed scow, at Central Ferry on the Snake River – even though it was around 4 a.m.
• “The last 11 miles into the garden city of Walla Walla is a pleasure, even though … your first glimpse is of the state penitentiary. Dusty, tired but satisfied, the travelers and the truck rolled up before the office of Fred Reed, representative of The Spokesman-Review there, and unloaded the last 30-odd bundles. … So now, you readers in those towns, give a thought to Jack Lyon and his long hours at the wheel.”