For 42 years, through rain, sleet, and snow, Matt Vossen has delivered the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Until very recently, it was a seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year job, one that involved getting up at 1:15 a.m. every day to pick up, roll, and sort his allotment of newspapers before, beginning not long after 3 a.m., tossing them on driveways and doorsteps across Clayton.
When Vossen bought the route, back in 1983, the Post-Dispatch was the afternoon newspaper. But not even a year later, the newspaper unceremoniously announced it was switching to mornings (its primary competition, the Globe-Democrat, would fold one year after that). Suddenly a guy who’d never thought of himself as a morning guy had to become one, and fast.
But he did. “You just do,” Vossen says. “You just find a way. You just do it and you see that you’re capable of doing it.”…