Postering the City, Flyering the Town

He's been doing this for about twenty years now, and Fritz Blaw, the affable "Motorblade" dude, is still going strong.

He started out in the early '90s, traveling via his Roller Blades or motorcycle, distributing flyers for theatre and dance companies and bands and unique art happenings. He began maintaining the community-notice bulletin boards in cafes and clubs and arts venues and more, eventually growing his circuitous route to comprise 200 locations. He's been making a large part of his living via this industry for two decades, and he's not planning to stop any time soon.

But, two decades. Things have changed. Environments, traffic volume, social habits. The Web flourished toward its current about-to-metastasize-to-everywhere status. Radiohead? Radiohead.

So what's it like, these days?
Blaw doesn't still skate his posters around, does he?

"No, I haven't skated to put up posters for about ten years now," he says. "And no motorcycle, either. I've moved on to a hybrid car – and I have plans to get an electric car, when the price comes down and they're a little more tested. But I did start out with inline-skating and motorcycling – when the town was quite a bit smaller and I was quite a bit younger."

And we can guess that the Motorblade prices haven't remained the same.

Blaw laughs. "I used to be ten bucks a week for a hundred flyers, and I didn't make any difference between an 11 x 17 and an 8.5 x 11, so you could pay me the same ten dollars for distributing either of them. And it's kind of like how restaurants maybe start out with their portions really big and then slowly realize that they're losing their ass? Also, I got married and had kids, so my rates had to go up."

So the rates went up, and now the man's earning his keep with just Motorblade?
Ah, no: That's not true now and it wasn't true then.

"I ran summer camps for skating for about fifteen years," says Blaw. "Those ended about five years ago, and I've since got a bus-driving license and started working the afterschool program at Child Craft, one of the oldest afterschool programs in Austin."

So Blaw's making ends meet with both the postering and the bus-driving?

"Yeah, since the skating school died out," he says. "Now, I'm hoping … I mean, the '90s are coming back around, and I'm hoping that inline skating might also, ah, I don't know. But quad skating – I do the roller derby – and quad skating, the old-fashioned roller skates, that has more of a cool cachet these days than inline skates."

Wait – Mr. Motorblade is involved with the Texas Roller Derby?

"I've worked with them for a decade now, " says Blaw. "And when I first started with them, I trained and reffed. I just fell in love with it and was obsessed for a while. Now I have a more removed role: I Zamboni the track before a bout and at half-time, and I hand out swag. I'm more like a mascot to the league now. I have a good time, but my responsibilities are very limited. I don't get dissed for 'bad calls' like I did as a ref – I just have to make the kids happy."

And his postering service, we've noticed, also seems to make people happy.

"Well, I distribute a wide variety of posters from all different kinds of organizations," says Blaw. "I've made it so that people in Austin expect up-to-date bulletin boards at a lot of places that people go to, and they appreciate being able to see what's going on. And it gives the business a feeling of being a hub of activity, an aura and a reality of people coming there. If you read about advertising at all, you learn that, more and more, people like those local things that are peculiar to different areas, to specific neighborhoods. And I've gained a reputation, after being around for twenty years, that I'm the guy who knows all those different places, who maintains them. People from all over check me out, people from New York and Scotland – I see that on the Google analytics for my site – and then they call me later. Sony in Britain knows about me, somehow."

And, according to those same Google analytics, not much has changed in Blaw's amount of business from year to year.

"Yeah, that's a good thing," says the grizzled skate-veteran, "and I think it's a product of being in Austin. This is a sort of antique vortex in the recession, a high-pressure area or something that's surviving. So, even though I'm fighting inflation, I'm treading water better than most of the rest of the country."

May at least that much hold true for the rest of us, too.