Deliveryman helped many on life's route

When 11-year-old Brian O'Neil started delivering newspapers in 1929, little did he realize what he'd started.

Not until 1986, with just one timeout for World War II, would he stop — and at that, he kept the "route" in the family, transferring the duties first to his son, Kelly, and later to Kelly's son, Shannon.

All this was recounted in detail, seasoned with much humor and nostalgia, at funeral services that honored Mr. O'Neil this past weekend in Vernal.

The man's 90 years on Earth were remembered for many accomplishments, including a posterity approaching 100 direct descendents, a lifetime of church and community service, and of course the war years, when he served in the U.S. Navy and met a fellow sailor who outranked him named Dorothy, a lieutenant who became his wife.

But over, under, around and through it all was an uncanny habit of getting up early in the morning to make sure one Salt Lake newspaper or another made it to its destination on time.

O'Neil began delivering the Salt Lake Telegram on his bike when he was 11, just in time to let residents of Kaysville know Wall Street had fallen.

He kept pedaling through the Depression, making money despite the hard times, later switching to the Salt Lake Tribune.

After World War II, he and his new bride moved to Vernal and Brian accepted a position as distributor of the Tribune to the Uintah-Duchesne territory in northeastern Utah. Now, instead of one paper route, he was responsible for distributing thousands of newspapers to the various carriers throughout the region.

In the early 1960s, after the Telegram folded, he added the Deseret News to the lineup.

It is inestimable how many porches got their papers because of Brian O'Neil.

Brian O'Neil's obituary caught my eye last week when it ran in the newspaper — appropriately in both the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune — as much for what it said about the future of newspapering as about the past.

Few 11-year-old boys, or girls, strap newspaper bags to their bicycles any more. And fewer and fewer adult distributors are left to mentor those boys and girls.

"Dad raised us with the newspaper," remembered Kelly O'Neil, the son who would inherit the family distributorship. "That's how he taught us to work and to manage our money."

In his father's personal journal that Kelly shared with me, a young Brian wrote this of his early days delivering papers:

"The newspaper route was good for me, helping me to meet people ... and to have almost everything that I wanted to have due to being able to have the money to purchase it."