JANUARY 18, 2024 – The letter to Cynde continued with the next chapter in my most challenging part of the job: quitting. Saturday. I slipped into a phone booth off Bailey Avenue in Buffalo. The windows were all broken and the traffic made hearing difficult. I dropped a dime in the slot and waited for …

JANUARY 17, 2024 – A key to Southwestern’s business model was making it difficult for any salesman to quit. In the first place, the only way you got paid was to work all the way to the end of the summer. During the third week of August the company would ship books to a centralized …

JANUARY 16, 2024 – My family and friends cautioned me to be wary when they heard that I’d been hitch-hiking deep into inner-city Buffalo in the morning and back out in the evening. If I had reason to worry, I was never afraid. Ironically, where I faced the most imminent threat—by far—was in the wilds …

JANUARY 15, 2024 – Early one evening I was making my way through a neighborhood when I came upon two couples sitting on folding chairs at the head of a driveway but not far from the street. I’d enjoyed a degree of success that day and was feeling more upbeat than usual. I called out …

JANUARY 14, 2024 – Despite the fear of failure that always accompanied me—sometimes out of sight in the shadows, sometimes writ large upon the door slammed in rejection—now and again I surprised myself. Three weeks into the sales job, I hit a gold vein in an otherwise desultory sales territory. I felt as though I’d …

JANUARY 13, 2024 – Early in the afternoon two hot days later, I turned down another old retail section of town not far from where I’d found the Chinese shop. Except all the action, as it were, wasn’t inside a mom and pop store but in the street—curb to curb—in front of a furniture store …

JANUARY 12, 2024 – The human brain has a way of softening, diluting, and covering up past miseries. In the context of the sales job, for example, I remember the fact of my afflictions—psychological and physical—but the memories of them don’t cause me current pain. Take the wicked sore throat I had the second week …

JANUARY 11, 2024 – Each day brought memorable encounters with the people of Buffalo. Going door-to-door, you meet all kinds of people—happy, sad, smart, dumb, kind, mean, guileful, guileless, short-tempered, tall-tale-tellers, people mad at the world and folks at whom the world is mad—and once you’re invited to cross the threshold, you see all kinds …

JANUARY 10, 2024 – During my sheltered life leading up to the sales job, I’d had little interaction with Black America. What encounters I did have with Blacks were either superficial or not at all instructive. At the superficial end, when I was in kindergarten our family took a road trip to Florida via the …

JANUARY 9, 2024 – My running and skiing marathon phase was still a few years ahead of me, but by 1974 I’d run and skied my share of long distances. The salient features of these sports is that even when you’re on a team, you’re always on your own. You sink or swim alone. The …

JANUARY 8, 2024 – No element of the Southwestern sales formula was a mere suggestion. The daily start time, the evening finish time, the daily door-knocking quota, the get-yourself-across-the-threshold quota, the give-your-pitch quota, the closing quota, the closing procedure, the weeks-end letter to your booster back home, and the weeks-end report you turned into your …

JANUARY 7, 2023 – When I first heard the Southwestern method of finding summer living quarters, I was dubious. As the hours grew on that cold rainy miserable Saturday in Buffalo, I decided the approach to finding housing was nothing short of hare-brained. Yet in the end, it proved to be effective. And who was …

JANUARY 6, 2024 – Late Friday of training week, the sales managers gathered their minions to inform us of our assigned territories. Curious about the Deep South I was secretly hoping—despite full knowledge that the summer climate would be unbearable—that we’d get assigned to some Godforsaken part of Alabama. Since I’d taken a swan dive …

JANUARY 4, 2024 – After final exams at the end of spring semester, I parked myself for a week at my sister’s house in Jamaica Plain, just outside of Boston. It would be my last stretch of freedom, I assumed, until summer’s end. If everything worked out as planned, after the sales job I’d return …

JANUARY 3, 2024 – Soon I received the congratulatory word that I was officially a member of Keith Ronck’s Southwestern sales team for the summer of ’74. My friend Mike would serve as my mentor, and in both capacities he called me to gush with enthusiast support. “Act enthusiastic, you become enthusiastic,” he said, leading …

JANUARY 2, 2024 – In the wake of Mike’s visit I mulled over the whole concept of knocking on doors, selling a one-volume encyclopedia with the heft of the huge Webster’s dictionary on the stand in the reference area of the library. It was too big for Mike to have lugged all the way to …

DECEMBER 31, 2023 – (Cont.) One and a half years as an undergraduate business major hadn’t changed Mike one iota—except he was no longer wearing his Interlochen uniform. He was still very much “in your face,” and when I introduced him to a few of my college friends, I could tell that they didn’t quite …

DECEMBER 30, 2023 – In high school I had a friend named Mike. By general consensus, Mike was a pain in the neck but an endearing one, if that dichotomy can be imagined. His high energy could be mistaken for impulsivity, and he was of strong opinions, intensely conveyed. He took special pleasure in watching …

Blogger’s Note: A new mini-memoir series! DECEMBER 29, 2023 – In searching for a new blog series topic, I dusted the cobwebs off my past to see what material might spring forth from cartons in the attic of my memory. Miraculously, some rich stuff surfaced from a tired old cardboard box labeled (figuratively), “SUMMER JOBS …