Reawakening the paper boy
At age 13, Chervis Isom didn’t fully understand the power of the paper.
Picking up his first Birmingham newspaper route in 1952 provided an avenue for the entrepreneurial spirit hidden under his quiet demeanor. But its influence would ultimately be the key to what he describes as his story of “redemption out of a rotten culture to a better place.”
The paper route would introduce him to the Millers, a couple from up North, whom he felt obligated to help acclimate to the “Southern ways of life.” Instead, their influence would cause him to start asking questions that would change his own views.
In the papers’ pages, he would first meet his future law partner, Abe Berkowitz, whom he describes as a “hero offering a distinct voice in Birmingham, Alabama, writing of a truth that so few people were willing to accept.”
These people, along with books, music and other influences, would shape Isom’s coming-of-age narrative.
“It’s easy for people to fear people who are different from you when you don’t know them,” he said. “Once you get to know them, you learn to find so much more that binds you together than separates you.”
Ten years ago, Isom picked up the pen with a new perspective, pushing around words to memorialize his mentor and childhood experiences in the diverse Norwood neighborhood. Several years into the process, he started to realize there was an arc to these stories that could become a book. The Newspaper Boy was published earlier this year.
“I wanted my grandchildren to know about the history of Birmingham and what the South was like during the Jim Crow days,” said Isom, whose four grandchildren attend Cherokee Bend Elementary, Mountain Brook Junior High and the Altamont School. “It’s a place we need to avoid, and it’s something every young person should know.”
As the primary narrative of the book ends, Isom, a young lawyer, is focused on his career (with what is now Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz) and family, trying to work hard and be a good citizen.
But, he said, he didn’t act on his coming-of-age convictions about culture and changing viewpoints until he started writing what would become The Newspaper Boy. It was then that his passion for community involvement was reignited.
Today he serves on the Board of Directors for the Norwood Resource Center, and after 12 years living on Montevallo Road, he and his wife, Martha, moved to downtown Birmingham.
As he explains in his book, today he is concerned about the regeneration of urban areas and is calling for movement into communities like the one where he grew up. He dreams of people of all ages, races and classes forming diverse neighborhoods — a redeemed version of the community where he grew up.
“That’s how a child learns how he fits into the world around him, seeing all the kinds of folks he’ll encounter later in life, out in the real world, the way I did,” he wrote in the book’s afterword.
The Newspaper Boy is available at Alabama Booksmith, Jim Reid Books, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Gift Store and Little Professor. For more, visit thenewspaperboy.net.