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 off a discourse on the power of positive thinking. Little did I know that it wasn’t just Mike talking. It was part of a much larger business model that I wouldn’t fully appreciate until I’d been steamrollered by it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself . . . and the script. The all important script.
Among the materials I soon received from the Southwestern company was a three page sales pitch, which I was instructed to memorize verbatim and the sooner the better. It started with “Hi, my name is [YOUR NAME, spoken slowly and clearly] . . .” After a couple of lines designed to disarm, buy confidence, and pique curiosity, it aimed at getting yourself in the door: “Have you got a place inside where we could sit down?” Once you had your foot in the door, you were substantially on your way, but you had to be prepared to field any number of hurdles and deviations. The script had anticipated the most common ones, and if you wanted to be a successful salesman—or in my case and imagination, a successful retail politician—you had to have the true and tried response down, word for word.
Among all my reading assignments that semester, including Aeneid for Latin class, Economics (Paul Samuelson’s classic undergraduate text), and all the Civil War books assigned by Professor Whiteside, I slipped in the sales script and my memory work. I couldn’t resist correcting the grammatical errors in the script.
For his part, Mike followed through on his threat to visit me at home in Minnesota during spring break. His mission, he said in advance, was to have me rehearse The Pitch a gazillion times while he played the role of Joe “Obnoxious” Buyer in Anytown, U.S.A.
We got down to business in the comfort of the living room of my parents’ house. On the first run-through, Mike “corrected” my grammatical corrections back to being incorrect. I staged a protest.
“But Mike, how do you expect me to say something I know is flat out wrong?” I forget exactly what the errors were, but they fell along the lines of “lie” (correct) instead of “lay.” He reacted with his trademark smirk and laugh, as if I’d said, “I’d rather eat caviar than get my hands slimy cleaning fish.”
“Different strokes for different folks,” said Mike dismissively. “The way you’re gonna have to deliver the sales talk is exactly as it’s written.”
“But I’m not kidding, Mike. What would Mr. Hintze say?[1] He’d be all over this with a red pen. Come on, Mike! What’s happened to your standards?”
“Mr. Hintze isn’t out there selling books,” said Mike with a belittling chuckle. “I don’t care—no one cares—what’s right or wrong. What you have to understand is that this is our script, and you have to learn it and say it verbatim.”
“I refuse,” I said.
“You can’t. Down in Nashville during training week you’ll have to say the script a bunch of times for a bunch of people, and if you don’t say it exactly as it’s written, they’re gonna make you change the way you say it. There’s no way you’re gonna get around that.”
I was a veteran of arguments with Mike, and I knew this was not one I was going to win. Later that night while I lay awake staring into the darkness, I pondered how ridiculous I must’ve sounded to him. In the nearly two years since our high school graduation, I was still living in a comfortably familiar academic world, while he had gone out and lived in the “real world.” I felt conflicted between the two worlds and both envious and contemptuous of Mike for discarding standards that he found inhibiting.
In the end, I caved on the grammar points, and the next morning I recited the script verbatim—repeatedly on command as if I were his ventriloquist dummy.
In addition to nailing down the script, Mike addressed another requirement: identifying a non-relative elder who would serve as my “at home” summer booster while I was pounding the pavement in Anytown a million miles away. The drill was that you were supposed to “report” to your booster every week of the summer; drop him (the gender was assumed) a note about how you were doing, how many sales you’d made, and how much you loved what you were doing. In exchange, your designated booster was supposed to pat you on the back with a quick responsive note.
I could think of no better booster than Fred Moore across the street, and I knew Mike would approve: Fred was not only an outspoken conservative Republican but a highly successful business owner, and more to the point, a born salesman.
For years, Fred had run a successful company, Beebe Laboratories, down in Maplewood, a suburb of St. Paul. After the place went up in flames in 1965, Fred redirected his business acumen to develop an apartment complex on the property. On the side, he became the local distributor for a number of odd-ball products, such as paddle boats (two display models of which were chained to a tree in the Moore’s spacious yard surrounding their elegant home), a sailboat on wheels for cruising around large vacant parking lots[2], and “Tug-o-War” brand adhesives.
Fred was an extrovert and he loved selling for the sheer sake of selling. He’d even sold encyclopedias door-to-door in Minnesota farm country during his summers while attending the University of Minnesota in the 1930s[3]. Fred and his wife Ruth were close friends of my parents, and one of their daughters was a classmate and good friend of my sister Elsa. They were also big fans of “our kind of music,” so the Moores and the Nilssons had always been on good terms.
All through high school and thus far into college, Fred had hired me to be his property “groundskeeper.” My job had started out as simply weekly mowing, which took well over an hour, but then he encouraged me to do other stuff, such as edging along the curbs and sidewalks, shrub control, and tree trimming. “Just keep track of your time,” he said, “and when you want to get paid, show me your list and time and I’ll pay you.”
I took him at his word, and I remember the surprise on his face when I presented him my bill for hundreds of dollars at the rate of five bucks an hour. But he didn’t balk and wrote me a check on the spot. More important, he didn’t discourage me from continuing my work as “groundskeeper.” He even complimented me on my work.
Fred had known me, of course, since I was an infant, and by the time I was a teenager, he took a strong interest in my musical efforts, as well as my interest in politics. He was genuinely interested in my education and career plans. When I informed him of my summer job selling the Southwestern single-volume encyclopedia, he was mightily supportive—for exactly the reasons that Mike and Keith had pitched to me so earnestly: door-to-door sales would be great experience for both lawyering and elective politics. I liked and respected Fred, and his hearty support of my prospective summer job was affirming.
Fred was duly impressed with Mike: a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy (about which Fred knew a lot, of course, given that three of us Nilssons had attended), now a college student who was not only a Republican but a business major out there selling, selling, selling. And Mike pretty much thought Fred was God.
“God” wasn’t only willing to serve as my summer booster. He was eager to do so. From Mike’s perspective, my nettlesome infatuation with proper English was quickly forgotten. I had God in my corner. How could I possibly fail?
Satisfied that I could deliver the script—grammatical errors and all—in my sleep and abundantly pleased with my choice of a summer booster, Mike packed up after a couple of days and returned to campus in Champagne-Urbana.
All that now separated me from my first million selling books door-to-door were a few more weeks of classes back in Brunswick, Maine, final exams, and five days of hard-core sales training in Nashville the first week of June.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] An extraordinary English teacher at Interlochen and loved by all his students despite the fact he took no prisoners when it came to correcting papers. He was the campus authority in all matters literary, grammatical, and syntactical.
[2] These contraptions afforded a wild ride. They consisted of a sail comparable to that of an Alcort Sunfish. The mast was mounted on a triangular metal frame on which a single seat was attached. Three pneumatic tires afforded a low-friction “roll,” and as I recall, you steered with your feet applied to a mechanism attached to the front wheel. Fred didn’t know the first thing about sailing, but I did, so one windy summer Saturday afternoon he hooked up a small trailer to his Cadillac and loaded up one of the models he had on hand. Together we drove up to the vo-tech school just west of the Anoka city limits. The facility had a huge parking lot that at that time of day and season was wholly vacant. I rigged the contraption and set sail while Fred watched. On the down-run I was going so fast I thought the thing would go airborne. My only mishap involved wrapping the rear axle around the base of a light pole in the course of rounding too closely. I got a bit skinned up but not enough to want to sue Fred, who anyway would’ve had a strong defense of contributory negligence on my part.
[3]This fact would become meaningfully redemptive late in the story at hand.
