(Listen to the conversation at www.mauitime.com.)
TOMMY RUSSO: [We printed] 15,000 [issues], 24 pages, and we had no idea how big, how little, how many papers that would be. Would it fit in a Volkswagen? Would it fit in a semi truck? We just didn’t know.
We had a little red pick-up that we shipped over. We bought this junk camper shell that didn’t close, and we stuffed this thing—we stuffed that camper’s shell with papers. The tires were scraping—
MARK D’ANTONIO: Yeah—
RUSSO: Literally the tires scraped from The Maui News to our first stop, Hamburger Mary’s and Requests Music.
D’ANTONIO: I remember taking a corner down here… in the truck with the shell that had no window and like 4,000 copies flying out the back on a windy day in Wailuku.
RUSSO: We didn’t have a route list. We did not have a circ list—we had no idea where we were going. And we just pulled out of The Maui News and we’re going, “Okay, let’s get rid of them. What do we do?”
D’ANTONIO: So crazy…
RUSSO: So we’d park the car, and we’d jump out and we would just run down the street and throw papers at people. We didn’t ask for permission—we, like, dropped and ran. And then we kept a note—okay, those guys got 25; these guys got 50. And we did that for, what? At least the first couple years.
D’ANTONIO: Couple years, yeah. It’s hard to imagine working that hard to put a paper out, and then having to be the distribution guy. I’d spend a whole day covered in ink. MTW
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