Growing up in New Iberia, Glenn Taylor learned the values of hard work while delivering papers for The Daily Iberian, values he still carries with him to this day.

Now retired from working in the oilfield for over 30 years, Taylor, 78, got his start while delivering papers in the 1950s when he was 11 years old.

When the job first became available for Taylor, he didn’t have a bike to do his paper route, so he went with the next best thing: a horse.

“We’ve always had horses,” Taylor said. “I didn’t have a way to do it (deliver paper), I either had to do it on foot or on horseback.”

Delivering on horseback was easy for Taylor — stopping his horse, jumping off and running on foot to deliver papers on his route, before hopping back on the horse and going to the next street.

Starting on Deare Street and ending on Lewis Street, Taylor would deliver 38-40 papers each afternoon after school. Taylor worked his route for about a month and a half before he earned enough money to buy a Schwinn bike for $30.

With his sack of papers in hand and his Schwinn with him, Taylor earned money for himself each and every week.

Working six days a week except for Sundays, Taylor earned about a nickel a week for a paper for every 25 cents he collected, around a dollar and change a week.

“Rain or shine, you had to deliver the paper,” Taylor said.

After he finished his route on Saturday, Taylor liked to reward himself with a chocolate Coke and a hamburger for 15 cents at Veazey’s Soda shop next to the old Evangeline Movie Theater.

Working at The Daily Iberian taught Taylor important life lessons like management of money and responsibility.

“You couldn’t just spendthrift,” Taylor said. “It taught you how to comprise things like money. Because when you’re delivering papers, you better have enough money to pay for the papers, that was an obligation, you had to pay for them.”

When Saturdays would roll around, Taylor would have to pay for the papers that he was delivering, and if by chance someone wasn’t home to pay their bill, he had to make sure he had enough money saved to cover the cost of the newspapers.

“You saved a week or two of collections just in case you have to go up there and pay your whole paper,” Taylor said.

Sometimes it would be three weeks at a time Taylor would have to collect money from those he missed throughout the week, causing him to backtrack to collect the payments.

But in the end, the hard work he endured while working for The Daily Iberian paid off, and not just in nickels and quarters.

Taylor then worked at the Zesto Drive-In, serving hotdogs, ice cream sundaes and more. And every night, would inventory what he sold and how much he made, which came easily after balancing his money on his paper route years before.

“You had to balance out your own cash box,” Taylor said. “I was good.”

From getting up early to cut the grass, wash his house, help his dad raise bees and more, Taylor learned the value of hard work and what it meant back then.

“He still uses those values to this day,” Tressie Taylor, Glenn’s wife of almost 52 years, said.

Born and raised in New Iberia, Tressie met Glenn when she was in college, and the two got married a few years later in 1968, raising a son, Leaf and twin daughters, Leah Taylor-Ignacio and Lori Taylor-Serwatka. Their daughters live in Los Angeles with their own children.

Always a worker, Taylor will forever remember those after-school days delivering papers, learning the value of hard work, which he still believes in now.

“I’m a worker,” Taylor said. “I’ve always been a worker.”