— by Matt Golec, 1/9/24

West Lebanon, NH

It’s really late at night, or maybe far too early in the morning.

Either way, the streets of West Lebanon are deserted—except for Penny Yanick’s white Subaru Crosstrek zipping from house to house. She moves quickly but safely in the dark, tossing bagged newspapers on both sides of the road, turning around in driveways, never stopping.

Nearly every day for the past 36 years, Yanick has delivered papers to sleeping subscribers of the Valley News, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. But that’s likely to change this year, as Yanick has scaled back her delivery schedule and plans to retire in the coming months.

“I’m just tired,” Yanick said, laughing at the crazy sleep schedule she’s had to maintain for so long. “I’ll be 68 this year.”

Yanick announced her retirement in the annual holiday card she gives out to customers. Lisa Baldez and John Carey of Hanover say they’ll miss her; she’s been delivering their Valley News each morning for 20 years.

“Because of her unfailing, on-time delivery every single day that we've been home for the whole time we've lived in Hanover, she's taken on mythic status in our family,” Baldez said.

The fact that, like many customers, they’ve never met Yanick — they hear her car occasionally, and Carey has spotted her when he’s been up early shoveling snow — only adds to her legend.

Carey points out that Yanick has been anchoring them to the print edition for a long time. “We don't know what will follow her,” he said. "I don't know if they'll have someone as reliable. But if delivery becomes unreliable, we might end up moving toward digital more.”

“The Valley News has changed a lot in the last 20 years,” Carey added. “Penny Yanick hasn’t.”

Penny Yanick, who is nearing the end of her 36-year run of delivering newspapers in the Upper Valley, talks about her career at Denny’s in West Lebanon. Photos by Matt Golec.

Yanick started delivering newspapers in the fall of 1987. The youngest of her three children had been born a year earlier, and Yanick took the job to take care of herself and her family. “I didn’t have to pay for a babysitter because the kids could ride with me,” she said.

That was in the age of afternoon papers, when Yanick could deliver during daylight hours. Back then, there was a wait list for people who wanted to drive a newspaper route. “Now, they can’t even beg people to do them,” Yanick said.

About five years later, the Valley News started its Sunday edition and switched to early-morning delivery. Yanick laughs to think she outlived the Sunday paper, which the Valley News stopped printing after the Dec. 31 edition.

Valley News Publisher Daniel McClory calls Yanick a stalwart of their delivery team and thinks she may have the longest tenure.

“It takes a special type of person to work the early morning hours and the number of days each year in all the types of weather the Upper Valley experiences,” McClory said via email. “She is one of them.”

Yanick starts her ‘day’ at 1 a.m., when her first alarm goes off. The second alarm sounds 15 minutes later. “The snooze is really easy to hit,” Yanick explains.

After some coffee, Yanick starts up her trusted Subaru, which she won’t shut off until she returns home many hours later. Her first delivery car was a Toyota, but she quickly switched to Subarus because of how they handle snow and ice, the bane of delivery drivers.

One night it was so cold her window froze in the down position. Yanick had to drive the rest of her route with frigid air blasting into the car.