Grinding It Out Page 3

  Among the regular crowd at the lake were two sisters named Ethel and Maybelle Fleming. They came from Melrose Park, Illinois, and they helped during the summer at a hotel their parents owned directly across the lake from the Edgewater. Their father was an engineer in Chicago and was an infrequent visitor at the lake. Their mother ran the hotel, did all the cooking, and much of the housekeeping. She was a remarkably energetic woman. The sisters would canoe over to the pavilion in the evenings and hang around with our crowd. After the dancing was finished, we’d all go out for hamburgers or have wiener roasts or go canoeing in the moonlight.

  Ethel and I were an item in the group almost from the start. By the time the summer was over, we were getting very interested in each other.

  My next job was in Chicago’s financial district as a board marker on the New York Curb, as the market that became the American Stock Exchange used to be called. My employer was a firm named Wooster-Thomas. A very substantial sound to that, I thought. My job was to read the ticker tape and translate the symbols from it into prices that I posted on the blackboard for the scrutiny of the gentlemen who frequented our office. I later learned that the impressive-sounding name fronted a bucket-shop operation that was selling watered stock all over the place.

  Early in 1920, my father was promoted to a management position in ADT, a subsidiary of Western Union, and was transferred to New York. I was very reluctant to leave Ethel; we were talking about getting married as soon as possible, but my mother insisted that I move east with them. I was able to get a job with the Wooster-Thomas office in New York. This was in the cashier’s cage, however, and I didn’t like it nearly as well as the more active work of marking up boards. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about it much more than a year. One day when I went to work, the office was boarded up, and the sheriff had posted a notice that they’d gone bankrupt. That hurt! They owed me a week’s pay plus vacation time. I had been planning to take my time off the following week and go to Chicago to visit Ethel. Now I could see no reason for waiting, so I left the next day. My mother was upset when I told her I was leaving and that I didn’t want to come back, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. She hated New York herself. After I left she worked on my father until he finally gave up his promotion and moved back to Chicago.

  In 1922, Ethel and I decided we’d waited long enough. I was still a minor, but I was going to be married come hell or high water. When I told my father about it, he got an adamant glint in his eye and said, “Impossible!”

  “Sir?”

  “I said, Raymond, that it is not possible for you to get married. You must first have a steady job. And I don’t mean working as an errand boy or a bellhop in a hotel. I mean something substantial.”

  A few days later I went to work selling Lily brand paper cups. I don’t know what appealed to me so much about paper cups. Perhaps it was mostly because they were so innovative and upbeat. But I sensed from the outset that paper cups were part of the way America was headed. I guess my father must have agreed. At least he raised no further objections, and Ethel and I were married.

  3

  A phenomenon of the early twenties that has passed into the folklore of great American frauds was the sale of underwater real estate in Florida. The men who sold those lots were made out to be the slickest con artists in the country. The stories of how they took gullible tourists into the swamps and separated them from their money in exchange for deeds to property that only an alligator could love made lively reading in New York and Chicago newspapers. But the whole business was blown way out of proportion, and many honest salesmen were maligned in the process. I ought to know, because I was one of the best of them.

  I went to Florida because the paper cup business was a bear—it went into hibernation in the winter—and a salesman had to live off whatever layers of fat he’d managed to build up in the summer. Of course, in those first years, that wasn’t much for me. Paper cups were not an easy sale when I hit the streets with my Lily Cup sample case in 1922. The immigrant restaurant owners I approached with my sales pitch shook their heads and said, “Naw, I hev glasses, dey costs me chipper.” My main sales were to soda fountains. Washing glasses was a real pain in the elbow for them. If they had water hot enough to sterilize the glasses, it would create a cloud of steam coming out of their soda fountain. Paper cups got around that problem. They were more hygienic, and they eliminated breakage and losses through unreturned takeout orders. Those elements became the principal points in my sales story. I was green as grass, but I sensed that the potential for paper cups was great and that I would do well if I could overcome the inertia of tradition. It wasn’t easy. I pounded the pavement in my territory from early morning until 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon. I would have worked longer, I suppose, but I had another job waiting for me at 6 o’clock—playing piano at radio station WGES in Oak Park. The studio was in the Oak Park Arms Hotel, just a couple of blocks away from the building where Ethel and I had moved into a second-floor flat.

  I teamed up with Harry Sosnik, the regular staff pianist, and we became known as “The Piano Twins” to listeners who tuned in to hear us through their earphones. We were gaining in popularity, with our pictures beginning to appear on the covers of sheet music, when Harry left to become the pianist with the well-known Zez Confrey orchestra. He was featured in a highly successful Confrey composition “Kitten on the Keys.” Later Harry formed his own orchestra and did well; he became a fixture on the Hit Parade show on radio. I was promoted to staff pianist at WGES, and this made my double workday complete. I had to arrive at the station promptly at 6 P.M. and play for two hours. I was off from 8 to 10 P.M., and then I returned to work until 2 o’clock in the morning. A few hours later—7 or 7:15 A.M.—I’d be off with my sample case in pursuit of paper cup orders. The only break in this routine was on Sunday, my day off from Lily Cup. But we had afternoon hours at the radio station then. There was no programming on Monday nights—silent nights, they were called. But on Mondays I usually played theater dates with Hugh Marshall, our announcer. Sometimes in the winter months I would be held up by traffic, and I’d arrive at the station a couple of minutes late to find Hugh Marshall stalling for time by chattering brightly into the microphone as he glowered and shook his fist at me. I’d slip out of my coat and muffler and, still wearing my galoshes, launch into some preliminary rambling on the piano, sight-reading the music.

  Sometimes a female vocalist I’d never seen before would be there, and I’d have to accompany her on songs I’d never heard, much less practiced. Often I knew nothing about the singer, her timing or style, and I’d have to fake and flounder. But it usually came out pretty well. At newsbreak, I would run to the washroom, kick off my galoshes, splash some cold water on my face, and wash my hands. That spruced me up enough to play with gusto until 8 o’clock, when I could hurry home to dinner and relax for an hour or so. The second shift, from ten at night until two in the morning, was usually a lively session. I enjoyed it, but I was beginning to run out of gas by the time we went off the air. When I reached home, I would start undressing as I climbed up the stairs, and I’d already be asleep when my head hit the pillow.

  One of my incidental tasks at the radio station was to hire talent to build up the programs. One evening a couple of fellows who called themselves Sam and Henry came in to audition. They gave me their routine, a few songs and vaudevillian patter. Their singing was lousy but the jokes weren’t too bad, so I hired them for five dollars apiece. They kept working on their characters and developed a Southern Negro dialogue that was a huge success. That team went on to make show business history, later changing the name of their act to Amos and Andy. Another pair of entertainers I worked with at WGES, also hired for a pittance, were Little Jack Little and Tommy Malie. Jack’s distinctive piano style caught on, and he formed a popular dance band. Tommy, who really had a way with a song, composed danceable tunes with tender lyrics. He wrote, among others, “Jealous” and “Looking at the World Through Rose-Colored
Glasses.” There was something especially poignant in those songs coming from Tommy, because he was born with both arms stunted, ending at the elbows. The royalties from his music would have allowed him to live in comfort for life, but Tommy ended up a penniless alcoholic.

  Ethel used to complain once in a while about the amount of time I spent away from home working. Looking back on it now, I guess it was kind of unfair. But I was driven by ambition. I hated to be idle for a minute. I was determined to live well and have nice things, too, and we could do so with the income from my two jobs. I used to comb through the advertisements in the local newspaper for notices of house sales in the wealthier suburbs—River Forest, Hinsdale, and Wheaton. I haunted these sales and picked up pieces of elegant furniture at bargain basement prices.

  Eventually, I was able to get Saturday nights off at the radio station, and this became the big night of the week for Ethel and me. I had to work half a day Saturday at the Lily Cup office in the Loop, and they would pass out the paychecks as we left. I’d stop at the bank on my way home and cash my check, putting most of it in savings and keeping enough for the week’s groceries and incidental expenses. Then Ethel would fix an early supper. Later we would put on our best clothes and take the elevated into Chicago to see whatever shows were playing—the “Ziegfeld Follies,” “George White’s Scandals,” and many legitimate plays; we saw them all from our dollar seats up in have-not heaven. After the show we would go to Henrici’s for coffee and pick up the Sunday papers on our way home.

  Those were the good old days in many ways. A lot of financiers and business moguls seemed to be looking at the world through the rose-colored glasses that Tommy Malie sang about, and if great men like Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover believed we had reached the point of perpetual prosperity, who was to disagree? My cup sales kept growing as I learned how to plan my work and work my plan. My confidence grew at the same rate. I found that my customers appreciated a straightforward approach. They would buy if I made my pitch and asked for their order without a lot of beating around the bush. Too many salesmen, I found, would make a good presentation and convince the client, but they couldn’t recognize that critical moment when they should have stopped talking. If I ever noticed my prospect starting to fidget, glancing at his watch or looking out the window or shuffling the papers on his desk, I would stop talking right then and ask for his order. In the summertime when the Cubs were in town, I planned my work so I would arrive at the ball park just before game time. I sold paper cups to a brash youngster named Bill Veeck, who ran concessions in the park for his father. I liked him, but I was afraid that his impertinence would get him in a lot of trouble. Over the years, I’ve never seen any reason to alter that assessment. Bill was a go-getter, but more than once I found him sleeping on a bag of peanuts. I’d tell him he was supposed to be out selling those things, not using them for a mattress. Baseball was a much faster game in those days. I could sun myself in a bleacher seat for nine innings and still get in a couple of hours of selling after the game. Nowadays you’re lucky if the game is finished before sundown. And they played great baseball back there in the twenties, too. Of course, Roger Kahn was right when he said in The Boys of Summer that “… baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when he was young, according to the watery eye of memory.” And the same holds true for the ball players one watched with the zestful involvement of youth. I can still picture Hack Wilson’s stance at the plate, and the sight of Babe Ruth calling that home run off Charley Root in Wrigley Field. I drove to the park for that game in my old Model A Ford to get in line for tickets at two o’clock in the morning. It was cold as hell, and guys had built fires in the gutter and were swigging gin to keep warm. I declined at first when they passed the bottle around, but I finally had a belt or two. After daybreak it warmed up, but those fellows kept hitting that gin. I saw them later during the game. I looked down between the bleacher seats and there they were sprawled on the ground dead drunk; I guess they never saw a single play. When I mention Ruth calling his home run, I saw the motion, but I don’t think he really called it. That was all in the minds of the sportswriters.

  My daughter, Marilyn, was born in October 1924, and having this additional responsibility made me work even harder. That winter was a particularly tough one for the paper cup business. Everything slowed down except for the hospital and medical clinic sales, and I didn’t have any of those places for customers. I didn’t do very well, because I thought of the customer first. I didn’t try to force an order on a soda fountain operator when I could see that his business had fallen off because of cold weather and he didn’t need the damn cups. My philosophy was one of helping my customer, and if I couldn’t sell him by helping him improve his own sales, I felt I wasn’t doing my job. I collected my salary of thirty-five dollars a week just the same. But my company was losing money on me by paying it, and I hated that. I vowed that I wouldn’t allow it to happen again the next winter.

  In the spring of 1925 I began to hit my stride as a salesman. There was a German restaurant called Walter Powers on the south side of Chicago. The manager was a Prussian martinet named Bittner. He always listened politely to my sales pitch, but he always, just as politely, said “Nein, danke,” and dismissed me. One day when I called on the place I saw a gleaming Marmon automobile parked at the rear entrance. I was looking it over admiringly when a man came out of the restaurant and approached me.

  “Do you like that car?” he asked.

  “Yes sir!” I replied. “Say, you’re Mr. Powers, aren’t you?”

  He said he was and I told him, “Mr. Powers, if I could aspire to own a car like this, you could have the Rock Island and heaven, too.”

  We chatted for some time about automobiles. I told him that I had ridden in the rumble seat on the outside of a Stutz Bearcat, and he agreed that had to be one of life’s finer experiences. After thirty minutes or so of shooting the breeze, he asked me who I represented and I told him.

  “Are we giving you any business?” he asked. I shook my head and he added, “Well, you hang in there and keep trying. Herr Bittner’s a hard man, but he’s fair and square, and if you deserve it he’ll give you a chance.”

  A few weeks later, I got my first order from Bittner, and it was a substantial one. He gave me all his business after that. Other accounts were shaping up, too, and my efforts paid off in a salary increase. With this and my piano playing income, I was able to go to a Ford dealership that August and buy a brand new Model T on a Bohemian charge account—cold cash. I had been reading about the business boom down in Florida. Newspaper cartoons compared the rush down there to the gold rush of 1849, and I managed to talk Ethel into going down with me for the winter. She agreed to go if her sister, Maybelle, would come along. That was fine with me. The more the merrier, thought I.

  Needless to say, my superiors at Lily Cup were more than happy to grant me a five months leave of absence. I went around to all my customers and told them nobody would be calling on them for five months, but I promised to be back in time to stock them up for the next summer season. Ethel and I stored our furniture, cranked up the Model T, and headed south on the old Dixie Highway. It was a memorable trip. I had five new tires when we left Chicago. When we arrived in Miami, not one of those originals was left on the car. It seemed like we averaged a blowout every fifteen or twenty miles. I’d jack up the car and pull off the wheel to patch the traitorous inner tube, and sometimes while I was applying the glue or manning the air pump, another tire would go bang! and expire. The roads were pretty primitive, of course, especially those red clay tracks through Georgia. At one point we came to a washout where the road disappeared and was replaced by a hog wallow. Ethel held the baby in her lap and steered the car while her sister and I pushed, sinking knee deep in the red muck. Our struggles were vastly entertaining to a barefoot band of ragged children who gathered to watch. When we finally got through that one, I knew nothing could stop us.

  Mia
mi was packed to the rafters with fortune seekers like us, and we began to despair of ever finding a place to rest our weary heads. Finally, in a big old house smack in the middle of town, we found a kitchen and butler’s pantry that had been furnished with a double bed, a single bed, a table, and a set of chairs. The rest of the house was filled with cots occupied by an assortment of male roomers, and the solitary bathroom in the place had to be shared with them. It was a place to stay, at least, and Ethel, bless her soul, didn’t complain. Not at first. But it became increasingly difficult for her when her sister got an apartment of her own, a job as a secretary, and went her own way. I got a job with W. F. Morang & Son selling real estate for a development in Fort Lauderdale along Las Olas Boulevard. It was amazing. Everything I had been hearing about the real estate boom was true. The company had twenty seven-passenger Hudson automobiles. If you got into the top twenty bracket in sales with them, you were given a Hudson and a driver for business use. That was for me, of course, and I made it quickly. I went to the Miami Chamber of Commerce and looked up the names of tourists who came from the Chicago area. I’d call them and fill them in—as one Chicagoan to another—on an exciting development I’d found in this palmy land of crazed speculation. They were all intrigued. I would take them by car up route AlA to Fort Lauderdale so they could see for themselves what was going on there along the “new river,” the intercoastal waterway. The property was underwater, but there was a solid bed of coral rock beneath, and the dredging for the intercoastal raised all the lots high and dry, with permanent abutments. People who purchased those lots really got a bargain, even though the prices were astronomical for those times, because the area is now one of the most beautiful in all of Florida, and lots there are worth many times what they sold for then.