A Foreign Correspondent Reflects on His First Job Delivering Newspapers

My first job in journalism—long before I knew that I wanted to write, and decades before I became a foreign correspondent—was delivering newspapers for the Columbia Missourian.

I started at 5 A.M. on February 1, 1979, during one of those cold, snowy winters that used to be common in mid-Missouri.

The front page featured a photograph of two local children playing in the snow, and a fifty-four-point headline carried news from a distant world: 'TRIUMPHANT KHOMEINI RETURNS TO TEHRAN.'

In boyhood, guilt was a constant companion, Peter Hessler writes. I stopped mentioning the quarters that Mr. Wood put into my pocket.