Grit

If you did not grow up in the rural United States, you probably haven't heard of Grit. It was a weekly newspaper, primarily covering topics of interest to farmers or those living in small towns in rural America.

I used to deliver Grit every Saturday when I was in elementary school, covering a twenty-mile area, and no, my parents seldom drove me; maybe once in a while when it was particularly stormy in the winter.

First published in 1892, Grit made a point of being optimistic in tone, publishing agricultural and rural news on a national level, human interest stuff, puzzles, and serial fiction. In fact, they had a special supplement for its fiction stories. There were sections for women and for kids, including a few pages of comic strips.





Looking at past issues on eBay, it looks like they tried to become something like People Magazine in the 1980s, with a glossy magazine format and celebrities on the cover.

Since then, it appears that they have returned to their roots, with the same kinds of stories that they had before, only retaining the glossy magazine format, sort of like Whole Earth Magazine.

 

I first heard of Grit in the late 1970's, when my oldest son was in grade school. We lived in a rural community, and he started delivering Grit every week using his bicycle.
People loved reading Grit, and he soon had a customer base that took him most of the afternoon to deliver. Since Grit always sent out a few extra papers besides the ones that he ordered and paid for; he had extras to leave more papers as samples and these people usually also started taking the paper once they had read the free sample.

We all looked forward to the bundle of Grit papers arriving, and there were articles and stories in there that everyone in the family enjoyed.
It was also an excellent way for my son to make some spending money, and one that started his sales endeavors.

 

As a way of demonstrating the way in which we are followed online, when I created this thread yesterday, I added a screen shot of an old copy of Grit that was being offered on eBay. Today, I go to my Facebook page, and find this as a sponsored ad.

 

Yes, I made seven cents on each issue but I made way more than $6 a week, most of it from tips. I cleaned up on Christmas. I inherited the Grit route from my older brother.

 

This thread didn't go far, but the forum was less than a year old when the last post was written so I am bumping it up to see if anyone who has joined us since the fall of 2015 remembers Grit.

As stated in an earlier post, I inherited a Grit route from my older brother. I covered an area of at least twenty miles, by bicycle when the weather permitted it, but I would walk it during the winter. People were pretty generous with the tips, as well as the cookies and pop along the way, but then I was related to the majority of my customers in one way or another.

We had a dog named Wags who seemed like the friendliest dog in the world when he was at home, but he always wanted to accompany me on my Grit route. I wouldn't have had a problem with that but he'd want to fight with every male dog along the way and have another kind of relationship with the female dogs, and that wasn't particularly good for business.

Sometimes, I'd have mom hold him back while I got started so that he wouldn't follow me, but he'd often find me along the way. He knew the route, and if I reversed it, he'd sometimes figure that out. He would also take shortcuts through the woods, even crossing the Little River, and would sometimes be waiting for me along the way, all wet and soggy from the river. I don't know how old he was, but Wags was the dog of my childhood. He was there when I first became aware of the world, and he died when I was seventeen.

Another time, when he wasn't with me, I went to one of the houses along my route. Since no one was home, I left the paper on their porch, which had a door that was left unlocked. Then when I turned to go, their dog was outside growling and barking at me. Although Wags had beat him up a couple of times, I didn't think I'd be able to, and he wasn't about to let me leave. I must have waited inside their porch for a couple of hours before they came home. Then, of course, I got, "Oh, he wouldn't hurt a fly."

As mentioned in an earlier post, I made out like a bandit during the Christmas season, though, and I didn't do too badly on my birthday.

 

I am pretty sure that my son probably found the ad for selling Grit in a comic book, since they were advertising there; but I really don’t remember exactly how he got started.
It was one of his first sales endeavors, and he went on to sell chewing gum to his fellow students at grade school.

The class had a policy that if all of the kids behaved well during the week, on Friday they were allowed to chew gum.
This was a good plan, except some kids did not have gum because it was pretty much a country community, and they didn’t get to the store to buy gum. We lived in town, so when we went shopping, my son, Tony, would buy a case of chewing gum, and then sold it for exorbitant prices to the kids on Fridays.
None of the kids complained at school, but apparently some of the parents complained that it was not fair that their child had to pay an outrageous price for a pack of gum.

Of course, no one HAD to buy gum from my son, and the kids all wanted to buy it, and even the school tried to tell the unhappy parent that their child bought the gum because he wanted to, even though he knew how expensive it was.
So, anyway, , the school ended up stopping the whole “gum on Friday” program, because the options were letting kids sell gum to other kids, or some kids went without, or the school would have to furnish the gum to everyone.

 

Grit was definitely a rural paper, so I don't imagine it sold well in cities. Today, it looks more like Backwoods Home or Mother Earth News, at least from the covers.

 

I found it on YouTube, and it was a magazine, and did look like the Morhter Earth News. It is apparently being put out by the same company nowadays, Ogden publishing.