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You
never know when somebody says something, or does something, that it
may have a big effect on you for years - maybe the rest of your life.
In the summer of 1937, I was selling Holland's Magazines in some little
town in Alabama. I don't even remember its name. On Sunday after I
was walking around the courthouse sightseeing and killing a little
time, a fight broke out on the courthouse lawn.
Two men - both over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred
pounds - stopped fighting about the time I got there because someone
had told them that they had called the sheriff. Sure enough, the sheriff
and two deputies appeared in just a few minutes. The sheriff was a
small man -about my size - 135 pounds - and I thought he was very
old - about fifty-five or sixty - and he walked with a cane. The deputies
with him were really big guys.
The sheriff walked up and asked the fighters what the problem was.
One of the men involved in the fracas told the sheriff that the other
fighter had a gun. The sheriff turned to this man and asked him if
that was so. He said he did not have a gun. Then the sheriff turned
to the first man and said, "You said he had a gun, but he says he
doesn't."
"Well, I thought he had one," the first man said. So the sheriff walked
up to the first man, who towered over him and hit him across the chest
as hard as he could with his walking stick. He said, "Don't you lie
to me, you S.O.B." Then he turned to his deputies and said, "Take
this man to jail."
I thought it was terrible that the sheriff hit the man with his lead
slug cane. I thought it was degrading, and that he shouldn't have
done it. It made me mad.
That night I tried to think of a way I could punish that old sheriff
for what he did.
Now
back in those days I was a pushy salesman. I thought that was what
I was supposed to be. As you know, there are all kinds of salespeople.
Some sell airline passenger tickets and some people sell airline companies.
All of your life, you'll be influencing people. Everybody sells either
products or ideas all of his or her life. Somebody also will be influencing
you, and this is proper.
So, I was known as a very pushy salesman. When selling my magazines,
when someone gave me an objection, I would always have three ways
to break down their objection. If they told me it was too expensive,
I had at least three answers of how they actually would save money
taking the magazine.
Anyway, I was pretty good and could make people subscribe to my magazine
or wish they had because I would stay right there and with them and
try to convince them.
The night after the fight I decided I would find out where the sheriff
lived and go to his house the next morning and be pushy and make him
sorry he'd ever seen me.
Well,
this is just what I did. When I drove my old Model A Ford up to his
house the sheriff was sitting in the swing on his front porch. When
I got to the gate, he saw me and stood up and said, "Come in, young
man." "What can we do for you this morning?" I told him I was a student
selling magazines, and he said "well, that's fine. Come on up and
sit down with me on the swing."
We talked for just a minute, and then he turned toward the window
and called his wife. He said, "Martha, there's a nice young man out
here from Texas. Would you bring us a glass of lemonade? It's already
getting hot and lemonade would taste good." The sheriff and I kept
talking and he was so nice I couldn't believe it. He asked me what
town I was from and what school I attended.
About this time, his wife came out with the lemonade. She was very
gracious and smiled and told me how nice it was to see me. By this
time, I had pretty much decided I didn't want to punish this sheriff
with my pushy sales pitch. He was about the nicest guy I had ever
met. In a few minutes he asked me what magazine it was that I sold.
I had a copy neatly folded in my back pocket, and I whipped it out
to show him.
He said, "Now this is really something. I think this is the magazine
my wife has been wanting to subscribe to for years." So he turned
and called his wife back to the porch. I showed her the magazine,
and she said, "Oh, my goodness,my sister over in Macon, Georgia takes
this magazine."
The sheriff turned to me and said they sure would like to have it
and asked the cost. I told him it was two dollars for five years or
one dollar for two years. He said they had better take the five-year
deal. (I only sold about two five year subscribptions a week, as most
of them were for only two years.)
By this time, I was loving this old sheriff. If he had asked me to
mow his lawn, I would've asked him to show me where he kept the lawnmower.
I'd never met anybody as gracious as this man. I decided that if he
had hit that fighter with his cane, then he probably had it coming.
What the heck.
© Harold Bell
Click here for the book review of Harold Bell's
"I WAS
A TEEN IN THE 1930s AND SOME MORE STUFF"
February
17, 2004 |
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