He’s delivered more than 2 million newspapers. Soon he’ll deliver his last.
Long after Monday faded into Tuesday, in an upscale subdivision outside Roswell, David Neeley reached for the first of 190 newspapers he would deliver before dawn. At age 72, he’d been throwing papers for almost half his life. He’d spent decades watching a vast and complex circulation enterprise dwindle toward nothing. The end of print was about six weeks away.
Neeley left The Estates at Chimney Lakes and drove on to Summit Oaks, where he estimated that he once had 40 customers. Now he had only one. He kept driving, found a paper in the cool dark and flung it backhand out the driver’s side window of his well-used Toyota Sienna minivan. It landed square in the driveway.
“After a couple million throws,” he said, “I’m incredibly accurate.”
To a rider in the back seat, already reeling from the van’s rapid turns in one cul-de-sac after another, this number did not come across as a literal statement of fact. But it was.
Neeley worked seven nights a week. He said there were some years he worked all 365 nights. He’d been delivering The Atlanta Journal-Constitution or its previous iterations for about 35 years. He averaged at least 200 papers per night. (Routes were combined as circulation fell, which kept the numbers steady.) You can do the math for yourself. Even if he worked only 350 nights per year, that would add up to 2.45 million newspapers.
Tuesday’s AJC had a story on a fire at an art studio and another on the ongoing tribulations of the Atlanta Falcons and a third on President Donald Trump and the Epstein files. At only 28 pages, it felt light to Neeley. As if it could blow away in a strong wind.
The night came in cold through the open window. Neeley pointed out some early Christmas decorations. The job involved long hours alone, a fair amount of repetitive scenery, and so he looked for signs of life. Sometimes he’d see a 2 a.m. runner or a small herd of deer. Once he saw a fox on top of a car, just lounging there in the dark. Another time he saw a fox dragging away a newspaper. When he flashed a light, the fox dropped the paper and ran.
Neeley is semiretired, if such a description could possibly fit someone who works roughly five or six hours every night. Back when he worked in retail management for the Butler Shoe Corp., he’d deliver the papers, go home, take a nap, go to the office all day, go home, take a nap and then go deliver the papers again. Somehow this was sustainable. Producing and distributing a major metropolitan newspaper required a series of remarkable achievements.
Longtime AJC executive John Mellott remembered it well. He started in 1987, around the same time Neeley did. The paper was delivered all across Georgia and into parts of Florida, Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina. The newspaper had eight presses that could each run 40,000 copies per hour. There were armies of press operators, truck drivers and carriers. There were several editions per day. The Three Star. The Five Star. The Blue Streak. The newspaper carrier was considered such an essential part of society that a special clause was written into state law allowing the carrier to drive without wearing a seat belt.
Sunday circulation exceeded 720,000 in 1993, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Subscribers included former President Jimmy Carter. One day Mellott got a phone call from one of Carter’s aides. Carter wanted the paper on his front porch in Plains. He’d apparently been told that the security officer couldn’t leave his post to bring it in from the guard station. So newspaper officials found a solution. The carrier went through a government background check and got clearance to wave at the guard and bring the paper to Carter’s front porch.
This past week in metro Atlanta, David Neeley drove on through the night, flicking papers out the window. His cupholders held two travel mugs: one of water, one of Seattle’s Best Coffee with a dash of creamer. He chewed sugar-free gum instead of smoking cigarettes and remembered the heavy newspapers of long ago. One Thanksgiving edition weighed 7 pounds. There were so many people he’d informed for so many years of so many historic events. Readers who had long since died touching the inky pages as they drank their morning coffee and learned of the newsworthy deeds of others who had also long since died. Neeley thought of himself as the typical customer. Old.
When asked if any particular edition stood out in his memory, he could think of just one. It was 29 years ago. A Saturday night in the summer, going into Sunday morning. He was at the branch warehouse when a call came in. Something terrible had happened. A new paper would be printed. The customers had to know.
The carriers waited, and waited. The paper was hours behind schedule. The presses fired up, this massive operation adjusting and recalibrating while the people of Atlanta slept, and finally the new paper arrived. The carriers departed, not used to driving their routes in the daylight. Neeley saw customers standing in their driveways, wondering where the paper was. He handed them their papers. It was eerie, he said, but it felt good to see how much they relied on him. How much they needed him. Here is the first sentence of a story that ran on that morning’s front page:
An explosion rocked Centennial Olympic Park at 1:19 a.m. today, killing two people and injuring nearly 100 more.
Every life is a mixture of things you can and can’t control. As the internet took over and the number of weekday print subscribers plummeted to fewer than 19,000, Neeley could do nothing about it. What he could do was keep delivering the paper, for the customers who remained, for as long as it came rolling off the presses and into his hands. In an ice storm a few years ago, his van slid down a hill and he couldn’t keep going. Eventually his wife picked him up. Neeley waited a few hours for the ice to melt. Then he went back and finished the route.
As the AJC moved toward its final print edition on Dec. 31, Neeley felt more excitement than sadness. Without this job, he could make a fresh start. He wouldn’t have to eat breakfast in the afternoon or dinner at 6 a.m. Maybe he could get a normal night’s sleep. He could even take his stepson on a trip to see his childhood hometown in Kentucky. Neeley was counting the days.
On a two-lane road in eastern Cobb County, some time before 3 a.m., a doe came bounding across the asphalt. Neeley hit the horn, hit the brake, missed the deer and kept driving. There were more papers to deliver. He would not stop until the job was done.
About the Author
Thomas Lake is a senior reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated and The Guardian. He's a co-founder of The Lake Family Band. Please email thomas.lake@ajc.com if you'd like to share a story idea.
