BOSTON – Waterman Road in Roslindale has 25 homes. It has two cemeteries. There is also a little boy who has a story or two to tell.
Eleven-year-old Joseph Zyber is a young newspaper publisher with two employees. “Actually, it’s just me and my mom,” Joseph said with a smile.
Joseph spends every Monday afternoon compiling the Waterman news. It is a one-page newspaper with all news ‘fit to print’, as long as it is news about Waterman Road.
“My mother told me to do something with my brain,” Joseph said.
Newspaper started as a summer project
Joseph, like most eleven-year-olds, enjoys playing video games. His parents, like most parents, would prefer him to do something else. After all, Oxford Press’ word of the year is “brain rot.” So last summer his mother gave him a project.
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“We told both of our sons that they needed to do something with their brains and something with their bodies and Joseph chose this for his project,” said his mother Elizabeth Perry.
So now you see the little boy with his green frog hat jumping around the city.
‘Thursday is printing and delivery day. On Fridays I play with my friends,” Joseph said as he quickly walked to the Roslindale Library, where Joseph is making thirty copies of his latest edition. The library card gives him $20 in free printing per month. To save money he prints in black and white.
“I’ve been doing this for a few months now,” Joseph said. “I’m really proud of myself.”
Waterman news delivered to neighbors
Thanks to his mother’s challenge, Joseph uses his brain and his legs. He walks from house to house on Waterman Road, dropping his weekly newspaper into mailboxes.
It’s a one-page article with recent articles about Porchfest, local grocery store prices, a local road project, and a replica of the future International Space Station that was recently on display at a nearby museum. The paper also contains puzzles and a word search.
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“There was a garden tour I did that was quite big,” Joseph said.
Joseph has an elderly neighbor named Phillip Anastasia who looks forward to him delivering the newspaper every week. It brings back memories of being a paper boy long ago.
“Where can you make three dollars a week or something at that age,” Anastasia said with a hearty laugh.
Joseph doesn’t make a dollar. He is paid in self-confidence. Those walks alone to the library teach him independence. And going door to door teaches him the value of knowing his neighbors.
“My social skills have definitely improved,” Joseph said.
His neighbors, like Mo Pepin, get more than just headlines. “It really brought the neighborhood together,” Pepijn said, noting that Porchfest had more participants this year than ever before.
Thanks to little Joseph Zyber, every mailbox on this road is full of something…. extras. Extra. Read all about it. In the Waterman news.
