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Well, yes. That would be Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump the first time, and Joe Biden.

Yes, Wilder first carried the Star to home-delivery customers, on his bicycle route, in 1960. During the final year of the Eisenhower Administration.

Wilder’s hands know newsprint and ink.

He also worked for a time in the Star’s mailroom – he can still “flyâ€� papers off a press conveyor belt, hand-inserting previously printed sections into them at the speed they leave the press. And his brain knows the inked word as well, since he’s read the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ for sixty-four years – and, these days, the other papers he delivers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

There’s a lot to this John Wilder.

He went from boy to man in the mailroom of the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, and, other than a short sojourn out of state as a youngster, he’s never left.

When he carried the paper on his bicycle, it was pretty natural for him to fall in love with the big noisy newspaper factory. There was a sense of being at the center of everything, an up-to-the-minute place, where the latest news was paramount – and indeed that news wasn’t going anywhere else until he and others like him took it there.

He was 13 when he started carrying the paper by bicycle and 15 when he started working in the mailroom. In those days, the Star gave ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ High a list of students who had jobs, and they’d be excused from some classes, which was just fine with Wilder, who liked the mailroom better than the high school.

A year or so later, he partnered with another kid about his age and they took a motor route – his very first. It didn’t end well – with a car crashed into a telephone pole on West Miracle Mile. “We were just kids, in way over our heads,� he said. “We didn’t know what we were doing.�

But as he matured, the lure of the newspaper remained. After a sojourn in California — “I wanted to be independent, to hit the road and make my own wayâ€� — he returned to ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ and was rehired at the Star, determined to make good — to make an improvement over his wild 16-year-old self.

“That was a pretty low bar,� he says with a wry grin.

He succeeded, soaring higher than any bar he could have imagined, for the next, oh, 20,000 nights or so.

He had plenty of role models. He’s unabashed about the tremendous influence Frank Delehanty had on his life and career. Delehanty was assistant circulation manager and years later would become general manager of the Star, running all things financial at the newspaper.

“It wasn’t that Frank and I had any special relationship — there are probably 100 people who worked in circulation who benefited from Frank’s wisdom and example,� Wilder said — but clearly none of them did more with the example Delehanty provided.

Wilder also remembers the positive influence of men like Ernie Gradillas, the home delivery manager who contracted him on the route that he still has. Joe Elias, who was his district manager when he began his bicycle route. “Also Edgar Suarez, who was mailroom foreman, and Bob Borboa, a fine gentleman who is still alive today, in his 90s; and Bobby Miranda. I worked for those guys in my teens and they taught me a lot. As I got older, they continued to be people I looked up to, following in their footsteps.�

He learned to be incredibly meticulous with his route, writing absolutely everything down. The route list updated every day with new starts, stops, delivery instructions, and he wrote it all down, and tended to the details with care. And he’s never stopped.

By his early 20s, he was delivering on much the same streets as he drives now, centered around Skyline Country Club.

While he was doing that and working in the mailroom, he took over a similar route for the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Citizen. “It really scaled up the operation,â€� he said. “It became too much for just me, so I bought a couple of trucks and hired someone to help me. We were delivering somewhere close to 1,000 papers in four hours every day.â€�

“I was able to leverage that into other opportunities — investing in real estate on a small scale, other investments.

“Good fortune has followed me.�

Lady Luck certainly helped him find a soulmate. Brazilian NiceÌ�a Maggessi Trindade was a geologist working as a palynologist for the Brazilian Geological Survey. She was visiting the United States, working on a project at Tumamoc Hill Desert Laboratory. Wilder’s mother was a lab technician at Tumamoc, and when NiceÌ�a needed a place to stay, Mrs. Wilder offered her a spare bedroom in the Wilder house. When John returned to ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ from his California sojourn, they couldn’t help but meet.

“Given my social skills, it’s probably the only way I would ever have found a mate,� he says.

NiceÌ�a took Wilder to Brazil to show him her country and introduce him to her family, then returned. And when they married four years later, in 1972, they decided to make their life in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, where she earned a PhD in geosciences at the University of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, and where The ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ awaited him every night.

“I married up,� he says, “which was the only direction available to me.�

And he kept delivering the Star. And the Citizen, for a time. But always, the Star.

“For years there,� he said, “I was delivering or responsible for getting delivered 1,000 newspapers a day. That’s 365,000 newspapers a year. A million newspapers in three years. So, it’s certainly not hyperbole to say I’ve delivered millions of newspapers.�

When you do your job well, and you do it 365 nights a year, good things happen. But few people can do that for as many years in a row as John Wilder has.

The job is a test. To say it requires steadfastness, dependability, work ethic, commitment, is to state the obvious. But for those who have those characteristics, in John’s generation at least, the job was also an opportunity.

Delivering newspapers has brought John Wilder financial independence.

“It’s paid off enormously for me,� he says quietly. “I guess when people ask me about it, that’s what I stress — the opportunity that it represented.�

Nice�a passed away in 2019. John, alone now, long past the point of needing to work, still wants to work. It’s what he does, every night of his life.

Things are different now. He and the other carriers are independent contractors, not employees. The newspapers now arrive not on a conveyor belt from the press, but rather on a truck from Phoenix. The number of subscribers has withered over the years; now John needs only about 200 newspapers to deliver his route. But the people waiting for those copies still depend on him.

Wilder likes people, and he has some customers he’s known for 40 or 50 years. One of them is Martha Brean — the mother of Star reporter Henry Brean.

But many don’t see him, and Wilder knows that’s the way it goes these days. Collecting is no longer done face to face, but automatically with credit cards. “They don’t want to see my smiling face,� he says. “What they want to see is the newspaper in their driveway, on time and in the right place every morning.�

How many more years will he deliver?

He’s philosophical. “My truck has 478,000 miles on it,� he says. “I used to get a new one every year, but I liked this one and I just kept driving it. Twenty years now, more.

“So, the way I figure it, one of these days my truck will give out. Or I’ll give out. Or the newspaper business will finally give out.

He shrugged. “Right now, I’d say I have a pretty good chance of outlasting the business.�