Years ago in a Star staff meeting I took the unusual step of broaching a matter of personal importance — that matter being the return of coin-operated newspaper vending machines.
They’re a jaunty, reassuring sight in a municipality, aren’t they? Civic. Fun to use, too.
The answer I got involved a simple, reasonable estimation that could be applied to the vast majority of things not done in this world: It’s a pain in the ass.
The stocking of papers and the collecting of coins, the occasional maintenance, the odd act of vandalism. Who’s going to take all that on?
The fact that your friendly neighborhood columnist might have done so was immaterial. Besides, been there, done that, and in the most extreme environment imaginable for a newspaper, Fairbanks, the Great Land, the American Great White North, the Last Frontier, Alaska — the resource-rich and far-off colony of military outposts and survivalists that somehow became a state.
My job, one long winter in the employ of The Daily News-Miner, was to drive a Chevy Suburban around the city and its outskirts all day, stocking machines and filling red vinyl pouches with the quarters used by the citizenry for their news fix. Single copy sales, they called it.
It got cold, all right. I remember squinting through the thick smog trapped at ground level by yet another temperature inversion, when the air up high is warmer than that down low, and making out 40 degrees below zero illuminated on a downtown Key Bank time-and-temp display.
I also remember shouting in pain back in the cab of the S.U.V. after handling all that cold metal. Bolts, compartments, coin mechanisms and coin trays. The worst were the padlocks, which required thawing by cigarette lighter from time to time.
As for the vending machines, the smaller boxy ones, those the size of a large cathode-ray TV, are indeed a pain in the ass. Rickety. It’s the taller, armored sentinels made by Sho-Rack of Shriner, Texas, that are built to last. One time one of them disappeared, only to be discovered later off some back road, destroyed, but its iron head remained impregnable — the thieves couldn’t get at the coins inside.
Once as I schlepped my heavy collected coinage in a plastic milk crate up a flight of stairs for drop-off in the News-Miner office, I met Sho-Rack’s sales rep for Alaska and Hawaii, kin of Jack Dempsey. He looked as tough as his product, too.
It was a hard job, and underpaid. I’d get back to my cabin in the woods worn out from the cold and reeking of exhaust. On the other hand, my previous job had been in a cubicle at a suburban Minnesota office park, which goes a ways to explaining what I was doing in Fairbanks in the first place.
That was the mid-1990s, before the digital revolution destroyed so much of the newspaper business. The Star’s still standing, however, and maybe someday there will be a resurrected Sho-Rack offering up copies in the village. The train station might be a good spot.