Newspaper Boy

Travel to the 1950's with Tom Barker as he takes you on his Rollfast Bicycle for a ride back in time when the minimum wage was $1 an hour, a stamp cost 3 cents and a newspaper was a nickel. Tom takes you on a visit to the lost world of the delivery of the mighty newspaper by an army of teens. Learn how hundreds of newspaper carriers got the latest news, fashion, sports, and advertising out to the masses. Understand the importance of the newspaper boy institution and the famous people it has influenced and were once among its ranks. Tom will tell you how he got his paper route, overcame obstacles, made new friends, and endeared himself to the customers on route S-2 in Irondequoit New York. Today newspapers are delivered by sometimes grumpy men in automobiles who deposit the thin wad of newsprint into a plastic tube at the side of the road. Back in the 1950's each customer had a special place reserved at their house for the gentle placement of the thick, rolled up, multipage conveyance of information. It was a different world back then and Tom will take you there.

Tom Barker graduated from McQuaid Jesuit High School in 1959, the same year that he "retired" from his "first job" as a newspaper boy. He found his interest in science and love of photography were well blended in the Imaging Science program at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). It was there that he was introduced to statistical methods. He landed a summer job at the fledgling Xerox Corporation at the end of his junior year at RIT. At the end of that summer he was offered the opportunity of a co-op. During this co-op he combined work at Xerox with his senior research project at RIT producing an analytical method for determining the "Degree of Permanence of the Xerographic Image." Based on his research on this aspect of xerography and other experiments conducted during the summer, he was offered an engineering position at Xerox. These experiments lead to more efficient and precise measurement procedures, saving thousands of  hours of work.  During his tenure at Xerox, he was responsible for six US Patents and numerous foreign patents. In 1985 Tom left Xerox for his "second career" as a professor at RIT where he taught applied statistics. Design of Experiments is his specialty and his book "Quality by Experimental Design" is going into its 4th edition. Tom is now Professor Emeritus after retiring from RIT in 2005. He continues to make movies and to write books ranging from two repair manuals for Gilbert American Flyer trains to his newspaper boy story. He has made over 100 movies and has earned awards for them on a national level. While at RIT, he came in second to a budding filmmaker (Martin Scorsese) in the Brown Intercollegiate Film Festival. Tom and his wife, Anne, of 49 years, travel extensively throughout the world and in the USA. He has conducted a Movie Camp for six summers for his two grandsons and their friends where the kids make movies. He lives in Webster, New York.