From Newsboy to World Renowned Biologist

Former Press Register colleague Sam Hodges pointed me to the autobiography of Edward Osborne Wilson, who was a teenage newsboy for The Mobile Register in the 1940s.

A young Edward O. Wilson collects insects with a net
behind his grandfather's home in Mobile in 1942.
Photo from the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Wilson grew up to become a biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist and author. His is considered to be the world's leading authority on ants.

In his autobiography, Naturalist (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994), Wilson recalls his time as a newsboy:

By the fall of 1942, at the age of thirteen, I had become in effect a child workaholic. I took a job with backbreaking hours of my own free will, without adult coercion or even encouragement. Soon after the start of the war there was a shortage of carriers for the city newspaper, the Mobile Press Register. Young men seventeen and over were departing for the service, and boys aged fifteen to sixteen were moving up part-time into the various jobs they vacated. On the lowest rung of unskilled labor, many paper routes came open as the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds moved up. Somehow, for reasons I do not recall, an adult delivery supervisor let me take over a monster route: 420 papers in the central city area.

For most of that school year I rose each morning at three, slipped away in the darkness, delivered the papers, each to a separate residence, and returned home for breakfast around seven-thirty. I departed a half-hour later for school, returned home again at three-thirty, and studied. On Monday nights from seven to nine I attended the meeting of my Boy Scout troop at the United Methodist Church, on Government and Broad streets. On Sunday mornings I went to service at the First Baptist Church. On Sunday evenings I stayed up through Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. On other nights I set the alarm soon after supper, went to bed, and fell asleep.

Four hundred and twenty papers delivered each morning! It seems almost impossible to me now. But there is no mistake; the number is etched in my memory. The arithmetic also fits: I made two trips to the delivery dock at the back of the Press Register building, each time filling two large canvas satchels. When stacked vertically on the bicycle front fender and strapped to the handlebars, the bags reached almost to my head and were close to the maximum bulk and weight I could handle. The residences receiving the papers were not widely spaced suburban houses but city dwellings, apartment buildings with two or three stories. It took perhaps a maximum of one hour to travel back and forth to the Press Register dock, load the papers twice, and make two round trips in and out; the delivery area was only a few minutes’ ride away. That leaves three and a half hours for actual on-the-scene work, or an average of two papers a minute—during which I reached down, pulled out the paper, dropped it, or threw it rolled up for a short distance, and passed on, moving faster and more easily after one satchel was emptied.

The supervisor collected the week’s subscription money from the customers on Saturday, twenty-five cents apiece, so I didn’t have to work extra hours that day and had time to continue my field excursions. I made thirteen dollars a week, from which I bought my Boy Scout paraphernalia, parts for my bike, and whatever candy, soft drinks, and movie tickets I wanted.

At the time it did not occur to me that my round-the-clock schedule was unusual. I felt fortunate to have a job and to be able to earn money…I still assumed, without any real evidence, that the same level of effort would be required of me as an adult.

You can read more about Wilson on the Encyclopedia of Alabama website. You can learn more about his work at the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

Edward Osborne Wilson in 2009.