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Show Chrony profile Employee lives with paper By SUZANNE DEAN Chronicle Editor-in-Chief Paper is a part of Larry Rufcncr's life. He files it, he delivers it-he even shreads it. Rufener, a Stanford University Universi-ty junior who is attending the University this quarter, brings a wealth of experience to his job as copy runner and distribution boy for the Summer Chronicle. He started delivering newspapers news-papers as a high school sophomore sopho-more and won the literary magazine maga-zine contest at Highland High for an essay describing his experiences. exper-iences. "Just as the sun is beginning to lighten the eastern sky, you are all ready to stuff the papers into that seemingly inadequate basket. Soon you real i.c that you are going to need to divide the folded papers into two loads," wrote Rufener of his high school newspaper boy experiences. ex-periences. Take-off Isn't Easy '"Finally , you're through pounding those hunks of newsprint news-print into the basket, and your face gleams with pride as you mount your bicycle. You get a wobbly start, and invariably tip over before you have gone 20 feet. Ten minutes later, after you have re-loaded the basket, you make an oath to be more careful from now on. "Now comes the true test of your abiiity as a paper boy," Rufcncr's winning sophomore essay continues. "Those weeks of riding your bike back and forth in front of your house and trying to porch a paper without stopping or even slowing down finally pays off, although you could sv. ear that some of the porches have shrunk since you last saw them... "Then comes the high point of the morning your first roofed roof-ed paper. Since you are never supplied with extra papers, you must scrounge around for a ladder lad-der or some other means o! obtaining the paper. By the time you are on the roof, the whole neighborhood seems to be awake, yet no one seems to appreciate your predicament. 'Oh well, this'll never happen again,' you assure yourself and any interested spectators..." Deliveries Become Mundane In the five years since he penned his w .r.g essay, Rufener's approach to newpaoer delivering appears to have grown more worldly. In the first place, he no longer writes essays about it. In fact, when interviewed, he seemed to view the job of delivering deliv-ering Chronicles as somewhat mundane. "I have an extremely systematic system-atic approach which I sometimes reverse for a little variety," Rufener said. "I pick up the papers in front of the Union at 6:30 a.m. Then 1 usually hit Orson Spencer Hall, the Engineering Building, the Medical Center and the Annex. "I leave the circle and some of the big spots until last so. I can watch all the girls show up for class." Refuses Frustrations Rufener refuses to let the small frustrations of his job fluster him. "The Behavioral Science Bldg. got upset when I put the papers on the floor. They demanded a box. So I swiped one from the Physical Science Bldg. and put it on the second floor in Behavioral Behavior-al Science," he said. "Then I got complaints because be-cause there weren't any papers on the first floor in Behavior Science. So 1 just took the box from the second floor and put it on the first. If I hear any more from the second floor, I'll just hustle the box upstairs again and leave it there for a few days-until days-until 1 get gripes from the first floor." Uses Scientific Data Actually, Rufener is rather conscientious about his job. A few days ago, he made an afternoon after-noon tour of his route to determine deter-mine which locations were running run-ning out of papers and which had surpluses. He's attempting to "use the data in a scientific-fashion" scientific-fashion" to equalize Chronicle distribution. He's also making a deliberate attempt to overcome "psychological "psycho-logical factors," which, he has observed, can affect whether or not a student finds a Chronicle in each Tuesday and Friday mornings. "I found that if I'm in a generous mood, I drop off big piles in OSH and the Engineering Building, and by the time I hit the Music Hall, I'm out of papers," he explained. "If I feel stingy on a particular morning, I may end the route with a couple of thousand papers left over." Copy Runner Included Rufener also acts as Summer Chronicle copy runner and errand boy. "That isn't one of the most exciting parts of the job," he says. As copy runner he takes stories to the printing shop and files photographs. Surprisingly, his Chronicle activities are only a part-time pursuit. Rufener has a full-time job feeding tithing receipts and other confidential papers into a shreader for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nevertheless, his Chronicle job is probably more secure. "A year from now my job as a paper shreader won't be around," he said wistfully. "They're getting automatic pulverizer." |
