Tales of an Amateur Newspaper Hawker

To draw attention to our newly designed paper, all staffers are helping to hawk today's issue at Metro stops and elsewhere. So I stood outside Union Station, with the men who were passing out the Express and the Examiner, and I shouted: "City Paper! Get your City Paper!"

I had to shout the name a few times before people believed me. "We get City Paper in the morning?" one woman asked. The other hawkers were gracious at my encroachment on their territory: Mr. Express made small talk; Mr. Examiner hawked a couple of papers for me and offered me a bottle of water.

These guys were pros. As the wind brought snowflakes, my hands were bare, and Messrs. Examiner and Express wore gloves. Also, their much thinner papers folded in half easily; mine didn't. Sometimes people refused a paper because the wind had wrinkled its cover. Sometimes my advertising inserts would clatter to the ground, and I or Mr. Examiner or some poor reader would chase them around the sidewalk. Thank God we added staples.