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 into the “fantastic opportunity” that my friend Mike had sold me, why not make an extreme experience out of it? Nearly a decade later when my wife and I drove through Alabama in late June, I felt immensely fortunate that my earlier curiosity had gone unsatisfied.
Instead of sweating it out in the Deep South, I’d be going north to Buffalo, New York. But my heart sank. Buffalo? Really? I couldn’t think of a more boring location. At the far end of the state from the Big Apple and nowhere close to the Adirondacks—the spectacularly beautiful part of the Empire State. The only things I knew about Buffalo were the Bills and the Sabres—and that President McKinley had been struck down by an assassin’s bullet at the Pan American Exposition there in 1901. I knew about the McKinley shooting because as a seven-year-old child my grandmother had witnessed it, a tragic fact that became part of our family lore. But otherwise, Buffalo was a blank, boring slate.
Our Southwestern overseers wasted no time in getting us launched. After learning of our ultimate destinations we were shepherded out to company headquarters in the countryside just off the Interstate west of Nashville. There we were treated to a cheap meal of hotdogs, sloppy joes, baked beans, Coke, potato chips, and brownies. This time it was on the company’s very slim dime. Tipping, of course, wasn’t even applicable.
We were then allowed a glimpse of the printing presses, binding operation, and packaging area where the one-volume encyclopedias were produced and assembled for shipping. The manufacturing space filled an expansive one-level facility, and I was impressed by the capacity of the place. This was no hole-in-the-wall operation.
I say “one-volume encyclopedia,” but in everyone’s sales kit—a hard bright red plastic box that could be easily mistaken for a two-gallon gas can—was not only an abridged version of the encyclopedia but a “Bible Stories” book (Southwestern was in the Bible Belt, after all) and a medical encyclopedia.
As the sun became a big orange disk slipping toward the horizon, the army of 1974 recruits began departing for their assigned territories. In keeping with the company’s business model, we were expected to reach our destinations by our own means at our own expense. What this meant was we had to find a ride with a salesman who had a car. If you wanted to ride in Mr. Rock Star Salesman’s yellow Porsche, which had room for only one passenger. . . well, forget it. You probably weren’t going to win that lottery. Somehow I was awarded space in the crowded faded green Plymouth coupe of one C.R. Bloke[1].
C.R. was a veteran salesman. He’d sold books for Southwestern every summer of college, and having just graduated, he was bound for Harvard Law School in the fall. C.R. was not at all boisterous. In his bib overalls and with his soft-spoken drawl, he savored people’s reaction to his affect—a strange mix of country bumpkin and sophistication. “I’m a hick who’s going to Harvard,” he’d say. Others were impressed. I saw it as false modesty betrayed by his need to be recognized for being accepted into the Ivy League[2].
His car, however, still displayed Missouri plates. I tried to imagine it and him in Cambridge, Mass. For the trip to Buffalo the vehicle would double as a freight hauler for umpteen cartons of books. Only veteran salesmen were allowed to take books to their destinations. By doing so, they could make deliveries and therefore, collect more money—and commissions—faster than we new recruits could. We slugs were to make our deliveries at the very end of the summer, after we’d submitted all our orders and the company had shipped books to us. The unspoken premise for this policy was that until we’d proven ourselves, that is, until our “PMA” was tested under fire, we couldn’t be entrusted with product we might not sell.
C.R.’s track record allowed him to take all the book cartons he could stuff into his coupe—trunk and interior—before his four passengers, myself included, could fold ourselves into the car. Wedged in like toes inside a shoe two sizes too small, we jointly let off enough body odor to require driving with open windows.
After we’d barely reached cruising speed on the Interstate, however, we all got whiffs of another smell: burning rubber. C.R. pulled over so we could all pile out to identify the source and determine whether we had to worry about a car fire. As traffic zoomed past we soon discovered the problem: the body of the car, its trunk heavily loaded with books and its back seat occupied by three passengers, had been rubbing against the back passenger-side tire. Who knows how close we’d come to a tire blowout. To remedy the condition, C.R. shifted the load around, with several cartons finding their way from the trunk to more forward positions inside the vehicle, giving us an even sharper foretaste of future airline seating.
We drove north through the night, and after someone noticed C.R.’s head dipping toward the steering wheel, C.R. yielded the controls to one of the co-pilots in front. As the early light appeared it revealed a dreary landscape south of Buffalo. A slate gray sky did little to enhance my impression of our assigned sales territory. We left the Interstate and entered stop-light hell cutting through an area filled with retail establishments built in an era of lax zoning laws. Back at the wheel, C.W. stopped at a strip mall where we bought street maps of Buffalo and found a coffee shop, where we loaded up on coffee and donuts. The moody sky began to yield a light cold drizzle—the kind that threatened to last all day. After we’d stuffed ourselves back into the car—now with ample sugar and caffeine—one of the recruits said out of nowhere, “Act enthusiastic, you become enthusiastic!” Everyone except C.R burst out laughing.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Not his real name.
[2] To my astonishment, a recent Google search found him—and a large, formal photographic studio portrait and a whole lot of information about his (distinguished) career. The photo was spot on. It depicts an older, very intelligent appearing, well-established, well-appointed individual wearing the same modest smile and same style thin metal-rimmed eyeglasses that he wore in 1974. As it turns out, given the focus of his life’s work and my own, we have much in common professionally and vocationally. By his appearance and bio (as a university trustee) I would guess that he long ago outgrew his “I’m a hayseed but look at me, I’m going to Harvard” complex—in retrospect probably nothing more, nothing less than a projection of psychological insecurity typical of a 21-year old recent college graduate from Missouri headed for Harvard Law School. I’d be curious to know what if anything he remembers of me, and if upon seeing me and my C.V. he might think, “That dumb uppity Yankee doesn’t have anything more to be uppity about than does this old . . . hayseed who went to Harvard.”
