2 former Telegram, Vindicator paper boys recall life in 1930s, '50s Youngstown

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Dante Giancola of Youngstown is 90 years old but was just a baby when his family moved to the city in 1925 — seven years after his parents had emigrated from Italy.

Youngstown was a boom town in 1925 — with its population increasing 273 percent between 1900 and 1930, when it reached 170,000 people.

Attracted by jobs in the city’s burgeoning steel industry, Youngstown’s newest residents gave the city the third-highest birth rate in the United States and the second-highest rate of non-English speakers in the country, according to the local history book “These Hundred Years.”

But prosperity was not in the cards for the Giancola family.

Dante’s father, Joseph, didn’t have a steady job when Dante was small. Joseph reported each day under the Center Street Bridge, where the mill boss would select the men he wanted to hire for the day.

“Sometimes he stayed out in the rain without adequate protection. He died of pneumonia,” Dante said, leaving his mother with four children to raise with no income. There were vouchers that helped provide food, but the family was poor.

In the early 1930s, when Dante was about 6, he helped earn money by delivering the Youngstown Telegram newspaper, which operated in Youngstown from 1851 to 1936, when it was bought by The Youngstown Vindicator.

Dante didn’t have his own route, but he helped two other boys deliver the Telegram when they needed help on his street, Park Heights Avenue on the East Side, and another nearby street.

What he remembers about the Telegram is that it put out its biggest paper — including its color comics section — on Friday instead of Sunday. “Jiggs and Maggie” and “Allie Oop” were among the most-popular comics.

A little later, he began to deliver The Vindicator whenever there was an Extra edition. Frequently the newspaper printed an extra edition when there was a prize fight. The cost was 5 cents.

Someone would bring a lot of newspapers to the neighborhood, and the kids would sell them, he said.

“You walked up and down the streets. If it was 9 at night, you walked up the street 9 at night,” he recalls.

When he got a little older and until about age 16, he had his own Vindicator route with 100 customers on Prospect Street between Oak Street and Himrod Avenue. It was a fairly small area for that many papers, but there were two houses on most lots.

When Dante had a family of his own, his son delivered newspapers, too, but only a fraction of newspapers are delivered or sold by children today.

“It was a good way for a kid to make some money,” he said.

Along with newspapers, Dante and his mother also learned how to apply wallpaper, and a property owner in his neighborhood paid them to wallpaper homes for him.

He later worked for a janitorial supplies company on Himrod Avenue, making 25 cents per hour. And after graduating from East High School in 1942, he went to work at Republic Steel, working at the Bessemer plant on the east side of Market Street downtown, making 73 cents per hour.

He “did the work other people didn’t want to do” — in hot and dirty conditions as a furnace operator. He retired in 1975 when the company filed for bankruptcy and later worked in a turnpike toll booth.

He and his wife, Mary, live on the West Side.

John Makosky of Campbell and Dante Giancola met not long ago and discovered that they had several things in common — one of which was their similar experiences as paper boys.

Makosky, who also grew up on the East Side, sold newspapers in the downtown Youngstown area when he was a teenager and while attending North High School, where he graduated in 1956.

He assisted the operators of two news stands on the Central Square starting in the early 1950s, which gave him an opportunity to see the bustling city and “learned a lot of lessons of life. I was exposed to all of that. There was always a lot of excitement in the downtown area.”

The money he made allowed him to go to the movies or sometimes go to Strouss Department Store and get a chocolate malt.

Makosky later went into the restaurant business, and he and his wife, Rose, raised a large family in Champion Township.