Mr. Wallace still remembers the thrill of shouting “Extra, extra, read all about it!” on street corners in Muskogee, Okla., in 1930 and being the primary news source for locals who did not have radios. By 1931, at age 12, he had a route delivering The Muskogee Times-Democrat’s afternoon edition.

In the winter of 1946, Mr. Wallace, who had recently finished a stint in the military at the shipyard in Long Beach, Calif., and was working at a paper in Upland, heard that The Winters Express was for sale. He took the overnight train from Los Angeles to Davis, Calif., and walked 10 miles through the area’s walnut orchards to downtown Winters. He bought the paper and the building that housed it for $13,500, running it until 1983, when his son became publisher. After retiring, he continued to type columns on his Underwood, wrote up the town’s history page and took the local temperature. Now he focuses on delivery.

While Mr. Wallace’s shyness and impaired hearing mean he says little when he drops off papers, readers are fondly protective of him. When Mr. Wallace delivered the paper to the Ireland real estate and insurance agency, he placed his hand on the shoulder of the owner, Timothy W. Ireland, and noted that Mr. Ireland’s father had sold him his first house. When Mr. Wallace left a dozen papers at the Winters Chamber of Commerce, the executive director, Mike Sebastian, said he had known Mr. Wallace for 40 years and defended him when tourists asked about his age.

“They always ask me, ‘Isn’t your paperboy kind of old?’ ” Mr. Sebastian said. “There is no way Winters would survive without the weekly paper.”

But newspaper industry experts say the world Mr. Wallace inhabited is gone, just as newspapers themselves have declined. Charles R. Eisendrath, the director of the Knight-Wallace Fellows in journalism at the University of Michigan, pointed out that paperboys had been replaced with adult professional deliverers in cars. They no longer have the same connection to readers.

“It’s part of the disengagement of newspapers from the daily lives with people,” Mr. Eisendrath said. “It was not just paperboys. It was the whole mentality of the operation.”

Like any wise paperboy, Mr. Wallace fills his route with perks along the way. After he drops off papers at the Berryessa Sporting Goods and Mini Market, a convenience store with walls lined with heads and whole bodies of stuffed game animals, he spends $2 on lottery tickets. He delivers three copies of The Winters Express to the Buckhorn Saloon, exchanging them for a beer. John Pickerel, the owner of the Buckhorn Saloon, said he had been welcoming Mr. Wallace for the past 33 years. After appearing in the paper’s police report once in 1984 (he would not say for what), Mr. Pickerel said, he had a new appreciation for how much the paper was read.