Post-Dispatch carrier gears up for retirement after 42 years of daily deliveries

For 42 years, through rain, sleet, and snow, Matt Vossen has delivered the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Until very recently, it was a seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year job, one that involved getting up at 1:15 a.m. every day to pick up, roll, and sort his allotment of newspapers before, beginning not long after 3 a.m., tossing them on driveways and doorsteps across Clayton.

When Vossen bought the route, back in 1983, the Post-Dispatch was the afternoon newspaper. But not even a year later, the newspaper unceremoniously announced it was switching to mornings (its primary competition, the Globe-Democrat, would fold one year after that). Suddenly a guy who’d never thought of himself as a morning guy had to become one, and fast.

But he did. “You just do,” Vossen says. “You just find a way. You just do it and you see that you’re capable of doing it.”

As a contractor who owns his own route, Vossen, 70, has no backup unless he personally arranges it. His daughter, Stephanie Brinkmeier, says that meant very few family vacations and no sick days. Vossen is proud that he only failed to deliver the paper three times because of the weather. One day there was 18 inches of snow, and he didn’t even try. Another time, Brinkmeier recalls, he started out from their home in Maryland Heights, but the streets were so flooded he had to turn around and go home. After last year’s ice storm, the P-D just told carriers to stay home. More often, he just found a way to make it work. One day, it was so icy his van rolled down a hill. He waited in the van until the ice melted, and then got back to making deliveries. The tornado that hit Lambert St. Louis International Airport near his home one Good Friday? Didn’t stop him. The tornado that hit Clayton last May? That didn’t stop him either.

He’s logged countless miles. His current van, a GMC Savannah, has 320,000 miles on it. “I got a rebuilt engine and a rebuilt transmission in there,” he says. “It’s quiet as can be and still gets me around.” By the time he got rid of one of its predecessors, it was in far worse condition: “I turned that one into the junkyard for $75!”

In 42 years of driving the same streets, you get to know people. Also dogs. Although, Vossen says, he has a great relationship with every last dog (in one instance, the dog comes up and he puts the paper right in his mouth). For a few elderly clients, he’ll walk the paper onto their front porch. And for two apartment buildings on his route, he goes inside and delivers to each residence. Some of those tenants have become such good friends, they leave the door unlocked so he can bring the paper right into the living room. Vossen got to know one of those customers so well, he brought his wife by to meet her. “She told me, ‘Matt, you listen to what Mari says, and you do it.’ When that customer passed away in her 90s, the Vossens hung her photo on their mantel, a sort of patron saint reminding the Vossens who’s the boss. “Whenever we’re having trouble, she,” he says of his wife, “just points to Jean.” 

Clayton is the kind of community that appreciates faithful service, and Vossen’s customers have taken note of his diligence. When he sent a note just before Christmas saying he was retiring, some sent heartfelt notes in reply. “I am your friend,” one wrote. That touched him deeply. Another contacted SLM to suggest we should interview him. (We agreed.) 

“Some people tell me, ‘I’m only getting the paper because you’re still delivering it,’” Vossen says. He tells them not to do that: “‘If you feel sorry for me, just give me the $100/month you’re paying them!’ They look at me like I’m crazy, but that’s alright.”

Vossen’s retirement is now set for Feb. 1. He turned 70 on Jan. 4, and that meant he qualified for full social security. Why not retire on Jan. 5? “You don’t get paid until the middle of February,” he says. “My financial advisor didn’t want that one-month gap.” And by his “financial advisor,” he means his wife.

When the Post eliminated its Monday edition back in October, Vossen wasn’t happy because it meant a pay cut. But it also meant that, for the first time in 42 years, he could sleep in one day a week—and he quickly learned he liked it. “I slept ‘til 5:30,” he says, sounding almost amazed. He thinks he’ll have no problem getting used to retirement.

Yet the question of what will happen to the route remains. Back in the day, when it had 900 Sunday customers in a much smaller radius, Vossen paid $50,000 to purchase the route.  (That’s $165,000, according to the federal government’s inflation calculator). Today, he’s down to 270 Post-Dispatch subscribers, and that’s after taking over two adjacent routes to expand his footprint and make up for all the customers lost to digital (or no paid newspaper at all). He now supplements his Post customers with another 250 or so customers who get national papers, mostly the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In the past, Lee Enterprises has been buying up other carriers’ routes and moving them in house, but he they recently informed him, curtly, that they’re no longer buying routes. He’s still stewing on that, trying to figure out if he has a different move. It doesn’t feel right to just hand it over, for nothing in exchange.

Even so, Vossen looks back on his life and feels pretty good about how it turned out. He was one of nine kids and graduated from University City High School (his parents moved out of the city so they didn’t have to pay for Catholic schools). After that, he tried a semester of college before it became clear it wasn’t for him. “I don’t even know why I did it,” he says. He was no great shakes as a student.

Back in the 20th century and first few decades of the 21st, newspapers were a good job. They allowed him to raise his three kids, who all turned out great. All three were good at sports, and his early morning schedule meant he never missed a game—even when his daughters were playing college sports in Memphis, he could drive down after finishing his route and then make it back to St. Louis by bedtime. The schedule that sounds so punishing to outsiders turned out to suit him just fine.

“I go on something that my dad told us a long time ago,” he says. “You can try to figure something out, you can try to make a change, but just get out of the way, because everything works out just the way it’s supposed to. That’s how it happens.”

His middle child, Brinkmeier, always loved helping her dad on the paper route. When he had eye surgery a few years ago, she helped out, along with her teenaged son, Will, who also loved the business. “He was just the best,” Vossen says, recalling their contests about who could get more of their papers on the front walk. 

But Brinkmeier has a good job at Enterprise, and never seriously thought about taking over the route. Her son is now 17. She tells Vossen that she’s sad no one in the family will be taking over after all these years.

“I wouldn’t want anyone else in the family to do it,” Vossen says. “That’s why you go to school.”