Another haunt from Trent Ling’s past appears upon the website today. Trent worked a paper route for four years (ages 11-15), making all kinds of money and devising various schemes to make things more and more interesting. For example, in 1979 at age 14, Trent developed a “Paper Route Baseball League” whereby certain customers were deemed to be “teams.” Trent successfully throwing a rubber-banded paper onto the porch from the street constituted a “victory” for that team, while missing the porch amounted to a “loss” for the team.
Trent’s Paper Route League emerged with its own Constitution, bylaws, Amendments, statistics, formats, and drama as evidenced below within the language of the original documents.
“The paper route years marked a deeply embedding time in my life that still stands out today as much as it ever did,” Trent shares 33 years later. “The Paper Route Game developed from my growing love for Baseball and my continuing love for drama, where underdogs always have a chance. I usually wrote out the rules for my various leagues and enterprises, thinking: ‘down the road everyone will want to know how this game worked.’ Now, a time definitely well down the road, we can all understand how this worked!”
Below are the four pages constituting the books on the 1979 Paper Route Game season. “I wanted to give the owner of 200 Frontier a trophy, but I was pretty sure that she would have been utterly confused if not outright spooked,” Trent laments. Enjoy!
Please feel free to join and further the discussion via the options below. No email or website information is required to post comments (unless you seek the notifications offered).
I agree with Meme, if you would have learned coding back in the day than Bill Gates may have never had a chance. I’ve known you since 96′ and this article doesn’t surprise me at all. I recall the firm days and how categorized and organized the case file cabinets were. Behind your back we would tease and talk about your ‘orderly skills’; who’s laughing now?? Thanks for sharing this, the flavor of your childhood continues to demonstrate how God began building you for His Kingdom at a very young age. Amen for you taking note of His orchestrations.
I’m with Melvin, when your’re trying to make sense of it all, things will not be a problem to bear with as long as you are enjoying the process; like you with your paper rout game rules, hehe… My head was spinning trying to follow and I often went back to your earlier sentences because I got lost in the middle. Oh, I was just trying to understand how your mind worked, hehe. Fun stuff!
That’s a perfect posting for Halloween! Very spooky 🙂
2 Things:
-41 Atom somehow cheated and beat 152 Eldorado to advance from the 1st round
-Man, I thought I was the only one that made up games. Though I never kept records, it was a time of real innocence and freedom. Those times may never be had again, but they do offer me something to give and protect for those that will and already have come after me.
I cannot even imagine what you could have done with a computer in those days. I remember the baseball league dice game when you made the dice from a Zip’s Fish N Chips box in the fifth grade (didn’t Papa teach you that game?). These things seem really beyond anyone’s imagination today, but back in the day, it was just ‘life with Trent.’
While reading this post, Matthew 13:11 popped in to my mind. On the mere surface you were delivering the newspaper, but in “reality” this intricate game was going on.
I feel this is an accurate picture of the life of a disciple. On the surface we are in this world but we really do not belong here (John 15:19). The secrets of the kingdom have been given to us and we are called to play our part on God’s intricate, redeeming plan for the world.
The “200 Frontier trophy” winners (humanity) are puzzled and confused by the Gospel of Christ but we are here to deliver the good news to their “porch” with accuracy and steadfastness in our assigned “paper route”.