"PAPER REX, PAPER REX"
01 /15/08
A popular local book in our area is titled "Whatever Happened to the 'Paper Rex' Man?" The book looks into local Cleveland area history and talks about better days. I suppose the demographic that the book was aimed at people who grew up in the first half of the 20th century. Anyway as legend has it:
"...the buckboard's metal wheels rolling over the neighborhood's red brick streets, the clopping of the big old horse's hoof, and most clearly, that certain way of calling out: 'pa-a-a-per raycks,' [People] all thought the paper-rags man yelled "paper-rex," and yet all knew that he was the man who'd pay you for newspapers, rags and certain items that he knew how to recycle to sell to salvage companies."1
Aside from Memphis Ave. and W. 48th being the location of our store it also happens to be on one of the old Paper Rex Man's routes. Though long before my time, and the well before the store's time the Paper Rex Man inspired a generation of entrepreneurs including the founder and controlling director of Memphis Surplus.
So in remembrance of the "Paper Rex" man we here at Memphis Surplus will do our best to provide an inventory that truly shows that one man's junk, surplus or salvage truly is another man's treasure.
FN1: Quote provided by: "Whatever happened to the "Paper Rex" Man? and Other Stories of Cleveland's Near West Side," Compiled by the May Dugan Center, Gray & Company, Publishers, Cleveland, 1993.
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