Cup of Coffee: The Paper Lady

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“Paaaaaaaaaaaapppppppeeeeerrrrrrrr”

Every morning for 55 years, the call wafted through the trees, from behind a barn, from the other side of the horse path, at the other end of the shedrow, down the alley. A long, lilting announcement that the Paper Lady had hit your stop on her daily paper route.

Letters can’t do the sound justice. Like trying to type out a rooster’s crow or a train’s whistle or an ocean’s wave. I can hear her call in my head, like a string of notes from Miles Davis on Kind of Blue.

Friday morning, the call was silenced. For the first time since 1960 when she began hawking Racing Forms at the front gate on Union Avenue, Nancy Robinson missed a morning at Saratoga.

Robinson has retired, or at least, taken a hiatus this summer to deal with her husband’s health issues. The Saratoga quilt has lost another square.

Robinson took over her brother’s paper stand in 1960. She’d sell 2,000 Forms a day, 50 cents a pop. Then it went to $2, cash only, no change. On a Travers Day, 6,000 copies would go through her hands to the fans, to horsemen. Robinson sold the Mirror, 2 cents. She sold, the Daily News, 3 cents. Or maybe, 5 and 10, she can’t remember. As her two sons and daughter (Jennifer works as an exercise rider at Saratoga) grew up, they took up posts at the corners of East Avenue and Nelson Avenue. Well, grew up is a stretch, they were 5 when they started peddling papers, the Armstrong Spreadsheet, the blowout edition of the Pink Sheet in the afternoon, added T-shirts to the inventory, always stuffing cash into garbage bags.

Robinson’s friends warned her about her daughter and a bag of cash.

“Jennifer was 5 years old, she’d stand on the corner by herself,” Robinson said. “That’s how good Saratoga was in those days.”

Eventually, as women were allowed onto the backstretch, Robinson began delivering papers to horsemen. Trainers had accounts, Robinson would hand them a penciled invoice at the end of the meet. Most of them paid. Freeman got two Forms…Whiteley, a Form and a Pink Sheet…Jerkens one of each…John Gaver…Tommy Kelly…Mike Freeman.

“It’s changed a lot. There aren’t many of us who remember those days, it’s a diminishing bunch,” Robinson said Friday afternoon. “The Coffee Man isn’t the Coffee Man any more. That was Red before it was Moe. B.J. O’Neil, he thought he was W.C. Fields. Squashee Mangini had the Morning Line. Jack Benny invited me to breakfast. The trainers, oh, the trainers, the Chief, Picou, Mike Freeman…they used to call me Sunshine. Some characters.”

Robinson added to the character.

When we started The Special, she was one of our first calls. She began distributing The Special like it was her own, calling when six bundles weren’t on the step behind The Horse Shoe at 5 in the morning, asking for more papers on some days, less on others and always updating us on who still needed one or who she missed at the end of the morning.

Some days, she was all we had.

Texting helped productivity, Robinson typing out messages like world peace depended on paper delivery.

“What day was weaver in, could you grab a couple of those for cindy?”

“On your way through, could u leave Amy a few more of yesterdays.”

“Could u leave a sun. At nihei barn 29.”

“A handful of wed. At bruce browns please.”

Sometimes, you had to read the text a couple of times, but the people always got their papers.

In business, you want good representatives, you want people to care like you do, you want loyalty, enthusiasm, honesty and a sense of humor is a must. Sometimes, it’s hard to find. Robinson might as well have been a Clancy, the way she handled her role. Pride? Like she wrote it, printed it, bundled it.

The Paper Lady relished her paper route, loved her customers and handed out papers with a smile and a laugh.

“This was a hobby for me, it was a living for you,” Robinson said. “I get a little lost now, I’ve been doing it 55 years, you wait for 10 ½ months for it to come back again. And, now, it’s not there. It’s just not the same, it’s your life, when it changes, it’s tough. You’ll say the same thing.”

She was talking to all of us when she said that.

As for her signature calling.

“I’ll have to send you a recording,” Robinson said, with a laugh. “You can play it at the Morning Line Kitchen in the morning and move it over to the other side in the afternoon.”

It won’t be the same.