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 know what to make of his enthusiasm.
Once I’d shown him around campus and impressed him with the high quality and generous portions of our college meal service, we repaired to my dorm room to talk business; to talk about the “fantastic opportunity” that he’d traveled a thousand miles to pitch face to face. Less than a minute into the “pitch,” my bookish roommate, who always studied in our room, never in the library, packed up his Chekov (in the original Russian) and organic chemistry textbook and announced he was . . . going to the library.
Mike then went open throttle. I knew from our sporadic communications over intervening months that he’d made “a ton of money” doing “direct sales,” but beyond that he’d shared few specifics. Now he was getting down to brass tacks.
“Let me ask you question, Eric,” he said, as he turned my roommate’s desk chair around and sat down, facing me after I’d plopped myself down on the nearby sofa.
“Okay.”
“How would you like to make more money than you’ve ever made in your life?”
“Well, naturally, yes, but . . . .”
“I thought so.”
Now let me ask you another question.”
“Uh huh.”
“You still want to go into politics, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do, but to be honest Mike, I’m no longer sure with which party.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Mike’s ambivalence to my qualification surprised me given his usual aggressive partisanship and my own record of “Young Republicanism.” “The point is,” he said, “you want to go into politics, am I right?”
“Well, yes, of course.”
“I know you as well as you know yourself, don’t I?” Mike chuckled in his habitually self-affirming way.
“And you’d agree with me, wouldn’t you, that the best preparation, the best experience for a successful career in politics is to get down to basics and meet people on their front doorsteps?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” I said, regretting immediately that by my emphatic response, I was giving Mike exactly what he needed to set the hook.
“Well, for you Eric, I’ve got an opportunity that you simply can’t turn down. In fact, I can tell, can’t I” he said, nodding at me, “that you’d jump at the chance to put yourself way ahead of other people out there who want a career in politics?”
“I suppose,” I said, not being quick enough to put up proper defenses. Mike did know me well. If any non-trust-baby would welcome a decent paying summer opportunity, for me the big draw was experience in “retail politicking.” Ever since I was in third grade I’d had my mind set on going into elective politics. With plenty of encouragement from my high school and college friends, whose naivete was exceeded only by my own, by the time of Mike’s “pitch,” I knew that I was going to run for Congress by 1984 and for the U.S. Senate by the end of the century. After that? Anything was possible. Of all my friends, Mike knew my ambitions best, and for his purpose at hand he turned this knowledge into his hook, line, sinker, and . . . net.
Except . . . he was not proposing that I join some political campaign. He was recruiting me to sell books door-to-door. The product I’d be selling “like hotcakes” was a one-volume encyclopedia, the finest encyclopedia—and the only single-volume version—on the market; one that would “sell itself.” All I would have to do is take orders and count my cash.
Mike went on to explain that the “fantastic” encyclopedia company—the Southwestern Company based in Nashville, Tennessee—would provide me and the other “few hundred” college students from around the country with intense sales training before turning us loose to “take orders.”
“In Tennessee?” I asked. “We’d be selling in Tennessee?”
“No, the training takes place in Nashville, but we’re sent all over the country. At the end of the training week everyone gets assigned to a team and the team gets assigned to a territory. It could be anywhere.”
The “anywhere” was attractive. Though I’d never been out of the country, I loved to travel. Thanks to family vacations, grandparents and uncle living 1,200 miles from Minnesota, and having gone away to boarding schools in two distant states and college in Maine, I’d seen lots of the U.S. and was eager to see more of it. To wind up knocking on doors far from home also fit nicely into my bizarrely grandiose political ambitions.
If I was “in”—how could I not be?—Mike would follow up with a call to his sales manager, one Keith Ronck. Keith who would then contact me to schedule his own trek to Brunswick, Maine to meet me and get me “signed up.”
For what remained of the afternoon, Mike followed me around campus, guffawed with a couple of friends of mine and me over dinner, and hung out in my dorm room while I studied at the library extra late into the evening. Early the next morning I saw Mike off to the Greyhound bus stop (outside a local travel agency) in downtown Brunswick. Three plus hours later he’d be at Logan his return flight to Chicago.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
