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 Maine, but he said I wouldn’t have to worry about carrying one door-to-door. The salesmen (all the sales people, it turned out, were male) carried a much lighter abridged version in their sales kits.
Back in those days, door-to-door sales were far more common than they are today. For years, with exceptions few and far between, the only solicitors in our current neighborhood have been kids from our block or the next selling popcorn or cookies to raise funds for band or scouts. In the 60s and 70s, however, door-to-door salesmen were regular visitors in American neighborhoods. The most regular was the “Fuller Brush Man,” because it was always a man and in that era, the Fuller Brush Company was the most prominent enterprise to have adopted the direct approach to retail sales.
Mother bought Fuller Brush products that way. I wasn’t sure whether she bought them because she needed and wanted them or since she felt sorry for the men who were trying to sell them. One in particular struck me as a lost and lonely soul. I want to say his name was Roy Holt—but I could be way off. That name or something close to it is what I remember Mother and Dad calling him whenever we happened to be in the car and saw him on our way to Ben Franklin or Western Auto downtown or over to church just beyond the center of town. He wore thick glasses and had prematurely white hair. He walked with a crimped gait and his feet pointed outward more than you thought they should. His signature features, however, were his severely twitching face and his head permanently tilted to one side. You often saw him walking alone near the center of town, and I always felt sorry for him, given his appearance, and because of it, I assumed, his ostensible loneliness. I wondered if Mother hadn’t felt the same way about him when for a short while Roy Holt was our Fuller Brush Man.
Years later I was astonished to learn from my parents that Roy—if that was his name—was an Hungarian refugee who’d fled his Communist homeland after the Uprising of 1956. I was even more amazed when Mother told me that our Fuller Brush Man was a highly-trained and accomplished organist and that while she once heard him perform Bach magnificently in a local church, his head remained perfectly straight and his face, wholly twitchless. As our church organist, Mother understood the power of music, or more precisely, the power of Bach. Living proof was our Fuller Brush Man at the consoles and foot pedals, pulling out all the stops.
Within a month after I turned 9, Roy Holt was no longer our Fuller Brush Man. Who should fill the void but Mother herself. This didn’t necessarily surprise my sisters and me. Mother was game for pretty much anything. Dad ran a very tight financial ship, and I’m guessing that to supplement her independent income as a piano teacher, she’d decided to branch off into door-to-door sales of products that she had come to believe in. Why not? She could be her own boss and work her own hours. Moreover, it gave her one more way to get a break from playing house, which, let’s face it, wasn’t her strong suit to begin with.
I don’t know how long it lasted, but for a sustained duration I was put in charge of packaging orders. Every week she’d submit her order list and a week later a shipment of combs, brushes, sprays, curlers, and ancillary products would arrive. My job—sometimes with my younger sister’s conscripted assistance—was to package them in paper bags according to the order slips, then fold over the top of each bag and staple it, along with the slip. My work area was the counter in the breakfast nook. Mother would take things from there, delivering throughout the neighborhood. To incentivize me, Mother shared a modest piece of her modest loot.
Thanks to the Fuller Brush Company, I’d acquired a sympathetic view of door-to-door sales, though I might’ve had a different perspective if I’d seen a door or two slammed in the unsettling face of our local Hungarian refugee or watched a door close unceremoniously on my own Mother’s toes. As I reflect on matters, however, I rather doubt that anyone was unwelcoming of Mother. Who in town didn’t know and like her? And though she too had a nervous tic, it was nothing compared to the severe disorder that afflicted Roy Holt—when he wasn’t playing Bach. Besides, Mother didn’t look or walk at all weird or funny.
In any event, when Keith Ronck, Mike’s sales manager made his promised appearance on my college campus during that spring semester of 1974, I’d reconciled myself to the “fantastic” nature of the “opportunity” that Mike had presented. I’d achieved this self-mollification largely by selective recall of Mother’s apparent enjoyment and modest success as a Fuller Brush Woman. Either my selective memory ignored the prominent “NO SOLICITORS” sign that Dad mounted on the inside of the recessed doorway of our house or it was years later that he put up the sign—perhaps at Mother’s request to counter the surge in door-to-door sales . . . at about the time I was being primed to knock on doors in a neighborhood far, far away. In any case, the sign was still there when the house was sold in 2011.
Keith was from somewhere in the South. His accent gave it away. By that point in my life I’d had little interaction with Southerners. A few had attended Interlochen while I was there, but they were hardly the caricatures that I’d imagined resided in the land of the Confederacy. They were artists, musicians who played Mozart and Beethoven, and if they were discombobulated by the first snow that blanketed campus, they adjusted well. After all, they were kids.
College was a slightly different story. Not that many Southerners were among us, but I do remember a guy in my Civil War class[1] who carried a chip on his shoulder toward all Northerners. He hadn’t yet accepted the fact of Lee’s surrender and carried on self-righteously about the “just cause” of the South. I grew to despise his accent until I realized it was his intractable viewpoint, not his dialect, that was getting the better of me. I wondered why he’d chosen to attend an old upper Yankee college that was the alma mater of a good many Civil War heroes on the Union side. Perhaps he was impressed by the fact that in 1858, Jefferson Davis, who was Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce (a member of the Bowdoin Class of 1824) was granted an honorary degree from Bowdoin. Less than three years later, of course, Davis would become president of the Confederacy.
But back to Keith Ronck. If his background was Southern, he wasn’t still fighting the Civil War, and being soft-spoken, his accent made him easy to listen to, not ridicule. Also, he wore bell bottoms, which impressed me, since he was old enough to be a contemporary of the younger professors. He was not at all pushy or “in my face” or given to smart aleck remarks the way Mike was.
What Keith and Mike shared, however, was a focus on making money. This was the hook. And they knew—or at least they assumed—that the lure of lucre was the ultimate American value, North, South, East or West; rich or poor, smart or dumb. Plus, in my case, both Keith and Mike carried additional bait: my plan to become a lawyer, then a politician. Mike had jumped right to the chase and appealed to my political ambitions. Keith, being more subtle, focused on my preliminary objective of a short (but noteworthy) career practicing law.
“You know, don’t you,” he asked, “what the most important skill set is for a lawyer?”
“Writing,” I said, referring to what my oldest sister Kristina—also interested in law—had once told me.
“The ability to ask questions,” said Keith, ignoring my answer. He attributed this insight to a “lawyer friend” of his family. When Keith wound this into his pitch, however, I began to think he’d made it up. The circular connection he made between lawyering skills and snagging me into his sales orbit was how “learning to ask questions” doubled as the key to success in door-to-door sales, which, in turn, would hone the most critical lawyering skill.
Just what Keith thought of me I couldn’t be sure. If Mike was the antithesis of a poker player, Keith seemed largely inscrutable. Ultimately, I decided it was simply concentrated focus—on making money—for himself, of course, since he stood to benefit by way of a percentage of my own sales. He was unimpressed by my Yankee college, which he never could pronounce correctly. This doubtless meant he was unimpressed by the fact I was a student there. All he cared about was whether I had the staying power to sell a one-volume encyclopedia door-to-door-to-door in some other part of the country. I convinced him I did, a result that fooled me as much as it had fooled him, because I wasn’t entirely convinced I was up to the task. But maybe that’s what it takes to be a successful salesman—or retail politician: above all, above a lust for lucre and the desire to be superb at “asking questions,” you have to be able to fool yourself.
Keith gave me a bunch of forms to complete, and said once they were processed, I’d be officially accepted into “the program.” Mike, Keith told me, would then follow up with coaching me on my sales pitch, which I’d need to memorize, then practice a million times, and read all about closing techniques. Starting the first Sunday of June I’d join all the other recruits for an intense week of sales training before being turned loose on all the “eager buyers” of the one-volume encyclopedia published by the Southwestern Company.
If Keith left campus feeling that he’d “closed the deal,” he left me wondering whether there was any turning back. Pride told me there wasn’t. What neither of us could know is that Keith’s steady but zealous dedication to a lust for lucre would lead to unspeakable personal tragedy for him and his family.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] The class was taught by the esteemed William Whiteside, Leon Trotsky’s look-a-like. He once told us that during his days at Harvard, he’d attended a lecture by Alexander Kerensky, leader of the Provisional Government of Russia after the February (1917) Revolution but later deposed by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution.
