The Paper Boy

Albert Sparks Jr. was born in 1929, the only child of Albert and Mamie Sparks. The Sparkses were good people, non-educated, and much influenced by the southern rural, fundamentalist Protestant Church. Two years later, in early Depression times, they built a small brick home in Bodenheimer, a community about 10 miles from Winston-Salem, NC. Albert Jr. was reared in that home-centered, church focused environment, and at age 10 he became a member of Royal Ambassadors, a boys organization at Bodenheimer Baptist. Still a member even now, his leader is a maudlin, highly emotional lady, a teary and true daughter of the Lord. And then, a fellow RA offered him the opportunity to become a paperboy. A new life began Albert Jr. had a route of 65 Bodenheimer customers, more or less. Every afternoon on his rounds he heard stories...Calvin Butner and his bootlegging, hauling white likker in a Nehi drink truck; Hub and Estelle Doty and their marital problems, and their strange succession of partners. Some stories have follow-up chapters, such as the German POW who walked away from a work detail. A key to the stories is Wellman's Store, where Albert Jr. meets the truck with his daily bundle of Tribunes. Every day he talks with Cece and Ella Mae Wellman about war news, and he hears gossip from the Ladies News Table. Most chapters have the date and a few headlines from that day's paper. In the final chapter, on the night of V-J Day, he met "the prettiest girl I've ever seen", 15 years old, and 'so-o-o soft'. Actually, she's the RA leader's niece. And they celebrated V-J Night, or at least they started. "I prob'ly won't go back to RA's."