JUNE 15, 2019 – It was June 1974. A high school friend who was well aware of my (then) political aspirations had recruited me to sell books door-to-door with a company he’d joined the previous summer.
“It’ll be great experience for when you run for office,” he said, “’cause to get elected, you’re gonna have to knock on a lot of doors.”
The books included a one-volume encyclopedia, a medical aid book, and . . . a Bible stories book (!). The books were published by the Southwestern Company based in Nashville, and the firm’s sole means of distribution and sales was a summer network of college students knocking on doors all over the country.
After one-week of sales boot camp in Nashville, each kid was assigned to a “team,” and each team was assigned to a territory. My team got sent to Buffalo, New York. For the first three weeks, I was in the trenches of working class neighborhoods where I experienced the usual fare of door-to-door sales: nobody home—for real; “nobody home,” except you knew somebody was home; polite rejection; impolite rejection; an occasional actual sale.
For the next two weeks, I knocked on doors in all-black neighborhoods of Buffalo. For me it was altogether foreign territory. I’d grown up in an all-white town in a very white state. I’d attended boarding schools and a college with only a few token, inner-city, scholarship black students and two or three American rarities back then—black students from well-to-do families. I’d never walked through an all-black neighborhood, let alone for days on end. Yet there I was, a minority of one for the first time of my life.
I remember feeling initially out of place and uncomfortable. For the first time I pondered how the blacks at school must have felt being in the tiny minority.
What unfolded was a real education
Not once did I receive an impolite rejection. Not once was “nobody home” when somebody was. And if I didn’t sell a book at every door, I sold far more than I had in the white neighborhoods.
But here’s the most memorable aspect of my experience:
I got invited into nearly every single house I approached where someone was home. I was always given more than the time of day. I was always given generous conversation. I was often given music. I was often given a chair at the family table at mealtime. By a wounded Vietnam vet, I was given poetry. Toward day’s end (I worked till dusk) each day I was given transportation home. (I was staying in rented quarters some distance away from where I was selling.)
In nearly every single house, I noticed two framed portraits hanging on a wall—one of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other of either President Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy.
I spent two weeks in that part of Buffalo. Sales flourished, but my profit was my interaction with the people—an education I hadn’t anticipated.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
