Traveling Salesman

When Roy had a job it was most often as a traveling salesman working small towns in South Georgia.  He sold different things over the years to housewives, home owners, small businesses, anybody really.  I don’t think he ever did a particularly good job selling and it’s for certain he never made steady money.  He did like the work.  Meeting people came easy to him.  Women generally like Roy, and while men liked him well enough it was rarely enough to persuade them to sign up for a sale.  Aunt Louise was the wage earner in the house.  He had a voice with the sweet snap of Juicy Fruit gum, a matching disposition, and if a history of failed enterprise hobbled his spirits it never showed. 

His sure thing money maker was going to be Kirby vacuum cleaners.  Kirby’s promised a good commission.  There was a time back in the 50’s and ‘60s when Kirby’s were only sold by independent salesmen, working neighborhoods and towns all across the country.  Roy built a list of prospects from neighbors, friends, relatives, people from his church, anyone who would give him a name and number.  To demonstrate just how good these vacuums worked he would scatter little bits of paper on the carpet.  He would sometimes do an entire room, eager to please and close the sale.  He was rarely able to get beyond the dreaded hope killing words, ‘I need to talk with my husband about this.’  Kirby’s were expensive.

On a few occasions he tried to sell debit life insurance, knocking door-to-door of poor houses to people who couldn’t afford insurance and who would let the policies lapse after a few months.  When you sell debit life you also collect the premiums, weekly or monthly, just a few dollars a week, but soon enough people would stop answering the door when the time came by to collect.  My father was another of the many who tried and failed at selling debit life. 

The little towns were prosperous.  Most had a bank, a Ford and Chevy dealership, local grocery and hardware, barber shops, dry goods and drug stores, tractor dealers, livestock auction barns, tobacco markets, a local paper, businesses that made up the retail and commercial life of small towns back in the fifties and sixties, before time and change closed their doors.  Then the four-lane roads the state started building to bring business to town proved even more efficient at driving it out to bigger towns down the road.  Roy, never in a hurry, was a two-lane sort of guy.

He sold pens and pencils with the name of a local garage printed on the side, ash trays, calendars, note pads, desk sets, and business cards.  The calendars were a favorite, name of the business in big bold letters at the top, and a glossy picture tailored to the firm – a rose for a flower shop, a tall steepled church for an insurance company, a scantily clad pin-up holding a torque wrench for a garage or a tire store.

With the manner of a solicitous funeral director and a smile that stopped just short of flirtatious he did fairly well at the florists’ shops, often leaving with a small order and the gift of a rose or a carnation he would take home to Louise.  ‘My wife loves carnations,’ he’d remark, ‘some don’t, but Louise has always been partial to a pink carnation.’  With some businesses Roy understood the value of gift exchange and reciprocal transaction.  ‘It makes them feel good to give me that carnation, makes it easier to sign for an order.  And you never know when you might get a call to for a funeral spray.’  Unfortunately, he never seemed to find the right sort of exchange for appliance stores, garages, filling stations, or tire stores.  Some guy running a tire store in Metter isn’t likely to give you a recap to take home to the wife. He was a walking example of the Pareto 80/20 Principle as applied to sales and turnover:  Eighty percent of sales or staff turnover comes from twenty percent of a sales force or staff, Roy being on the wrong side of the equation in both cases.  But businesses in the fifties and early sixties still had enough slack in their operations to employ guys such as Roy.  This sort of generosity, or inefficiency, as one prefers, would later be squeezed out by rationalization, consolidation, and cost efficiencies. 

Because his pay was usually straight commission he got hired for a lot of different jobs.  It didn’t cost much to hire someone paid on commission.  Easy in, easy out.  Spotty sales and skimpy paydays notwithstanding, Roy was a cheerful salesman.  He liked the road, liked meeting people, liked the coffee and conversation in the small-town cafes, always welcome when he stopped by.  Roy always had news of happenings in the next town, knew when the owner of another café down the road was doing poorly, knew who was looking for a cook, knew about any scandals or gossip, happy to pass along inquires or well wishes.  Often as not he’d be offered a cup and a slice of pie.  Reciprocal transactional exchange.  ‘Be sure to tell Eileen I asked about her new granddaughter!’ 

He liked the independence, the freedom.  Town to town, one customer to another, he was on his own, his clock, with no one watching to see if he was working or just leaning against a counter telling stories.  He tried that sort of work from time to time, a regular job, clerking in furniture or dry goods stores, tried but soon moved on.  The regular part would get to him, the be here at eight and stay here till time to close and work in between time.  He would too often be found talking to customers, hands in the pocket of his slacks, talking to a customer who wasn’t buying a bedroom suite and was anyway eager to get home.   He told me that there was one rule to selling furniture.  ‘All you need to know is that a headboard is a headboard and a footboard is a footboard,’ winking as he said it.  Roy also suffered from the commonplace belief that he knew better than the owners how the business should be run, with a sharp eye for all the things they were doing wrong.

Roy was made for the road, Jesup to Glennville, up to Claxton, Reidsville, little towns like Cobbtown and Collins, over to Lyons and Vidalia, down to Hazelhurst and Alma, sample case on the seat just in case, finger tapping out the time a song on the radio, singing along in the fine baritone singing in the choir at First Baptist.  ‘…Oh the day we met, I went astray, I started rolling down that lost highway.’  Traveling sales fit his temper and his tempo. 

I asked him why he didn’t try his hand at driving a truck.  ‘I don’t like wearing caps,’ he said, ‘and I’d never get home in time to fix dinner.’  His various jobs in South Georgia never took him so far that he wouldn’t be home in time to have dinner waiting for Louise when she got in from work.  If never the breadwinner, Roy was a good cook, taking care to make breakfast and dinner for Louise, standing at the stove with an apron over dress shirt and tie while he fried pork chops, readied the green beans and potatoes.  He kept a clean house, whistling as he swept the kitchen and set the table. 

If I ever knew where he came from, what little town, it is information lost to the living.  He was the oldest by ten or fifteen years of the various aunts and uncles who came for Sundays, born in 1905, too young for WWI and too old for WWII.  That made him stand out a little.  ‘I did my part to help out,’ he said, working in the Southeastern Shipyard alongside the Savannah River.  He and Louise, married in the thirties, worked at the shipyard, driving in with a several others each morning from Pembroke.  The war over, Roy settled into the patten of short-term employment that would fill his working days.

I rode with him to a business in Glenville that sold lumber, hardware, farm equipment, and garden supplies.  It had been around forever and was owned by a man named Dubberly.  There were a lot of Dubberly’s in Glenville and Tattnall County.  ‘Now honey,’ he said, he called very nearly everyone honey, ‘you watch how easy I sell this fellow on a billboard and some signs for his store.  Customers don’t know what you got ain’t likely to stop, are they?  A good billboard will tell them, pay for itself over and over.’  He had me sold before he pulled in. He winked as he got out of the car.  ‘Just watch,’ he said.

‘Need a billboard so folks will know what I’m selling?’  Dubberly was incredulous.  ‘Hell, anyone can see what we sell.  There’s tractors out front and a shed full of lumber. Besides, we’ve been here for close on forty years and everybody from Claxton to Ludowici knows who we are.’  Roy offered that travelers passing by on Highway 25, then a busy north/south tourist route, might not know.  Dubberly stopped that one.  ‘You think folks headed to Florida are gonna stop here and buy some lumber?  Ha.  I don’t need a billboard.  What I need a good parts man,’ looking at Roy, ‘You ever sell parts?’  Back in the car Roy was upbeat.  ‘Can’t sell ’em every time.  So how about you and me head down to Ludowici for a stop at the drug store?  We can watch him push the red-light button to catch a tourist.’ 

He lived with his son after Louise died but it was not an easy fit.  While Roy was fastidious and regular, the son was messy and haphazard.  After a couple of years, he somehow met a widow from up in Bamburg, South Carolina, married and move in and I guess set up housekeeping with her.  We went to his funeral at a church out in the country.  He was buried with his new wife’s people in the cemetery alongside the church.  A few greetings and stories and we were gone.  Louise rests beside her mother back in Georgia.