Life History of Serge J. Lauper
After some twenty-six months, I got my release. I planned to take the boat to New York and then the train back to Utah where my folks lived. I had two of the lady missionaries and two of the elders take me right out to the boat. I travelled for three days from Jacksonville to New York, not a very fast trip. We did stop off at several places. I remember that at Charleston, South Carolina, we had the chance of going into the city to see some beautiful old homes.
It was a very funny feeling to mix with the crowd on board ship and know that I was no longer a straight-laced missionary. They held a dance on the ship every evening, and it was quite a new experience. In those days they released missionaries in the field instead of coming right home to be released by the stake president. I think that the new way is much the best way; we had experiences in the southern states with some missionaries who decided not to go home. We had one who stayed in Florida and some who stayed in New York.
I still remember coming into New York harbor. I sailed in on a very foggy, cold December day. I could hardly see the Statue of Liberty. I spent about four days in New York in a hotel right in Times Square. I can still remember seeing that big, big, big light right outside of my window. I was cold. Even though I bundled up as much as I could, I had only my summer clothing from Florida.
I visited with some missionary families, one of them in Trenton, New Jersey. Among my interesting experiences was sightseeing with a girl named Vivian who was a manicurist. Her family in Mississippi had kept track of me and heard about my release. They invited me to call her when I came to New York. She arranged to take me out to Greenwich Village to see some of the highlights. She also took me to the first really big show that I had ever seen, "The King of Kings," which was in one of the important Broadway theatres. It was a movie theatre with a live show as well. I guess I could have gotten into trouble with her pretty easily, but I said goodbye and went on my way.
I took a side trip to Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. I saw huge masses of ice that winter. They played a lot of lights over the tremendous icicles. Niagara Falls was a spectacular sight.
Among other things, on my way home, I stopped at the Hill Cumorah and Palmyra. I visited Joseph Smith's home, went into the Sacred Grove, and walked there all alone, thinking about a lot of things. I didn't see the Grove again until some forty or fifty years later when we went east to the family reunion. There have been many changes. I first saw the Hill Cumorah as a barren hill. Now that area is all covered with trees and bushes. The City of Palmyra, though, was still an oldish-looking town when I went back years later.
I headed west to Sugarville, about ten miles out of Delta, Utah, where my family was living. When I arrived there, I found my family in precarious circumstances. They were living in a temporary, inadequate place. What they had in mind, my father especially, and I guess my mother, too, was that I would take over and manage the farm. I settled down to stay there, and it was agony all the time. I knew right away that I didn't want to do it. By the end of a week, I told them that I was going back to Los Angeles.
I've always been very careful about money. I had a few hundred dollars left from my mission. I had not spent it, although I could have spent it many times over along the line. I had enough money to buy myself a ticket, which I did.
I left the family in Delta and took the train to Los Angeles. I still recall very vividly that several of the family took me to the train in the old Ford. Mother, of course, had not gone. She was standing in the doorway crying when I left, lost and forlorn. It was a very sad leave-taking. All the little ones, I think there were three or four, and Dad didn't want me to go. But I had a very strong sense of relief when I finally got on the train. I felt I had just escaped doom.
I went to stay in Los Angeles where my brother Ivan had rented a small house. I took over my share of the rent and looked for a job. The first thing that I did was to work on the Huntington Park chapel for half of a low salary and half contribution toward the building. The chapel was very ambitious for that day.
In the meantime, I was trying to get a job, and I finally landed one selling Excelsis Products. The company was similar to the Watkins Company; they had a line of food products such as spices and extracts, baking goods, and also a perfume and cosmetic line. My first job was similar to my tracting days down in the south. I worked out a system and, working pretty hard, was successful. I was the first man in sales the second month.
My recipe was that I would go up to the housewife at the door and size her up, deciding from how she looked, whether she was more interested in the kitchen or in her appearance. If she looked like the sturdy housewife type, I had her smelling vanilla or sniffing some of my pepper quickly. If she was other type, I had her smelling some of my perfume or using some of my cream. I worked this surprise tactic before she had a chance to say she didn't want any. I got some people interested. This was a Salt Lake City company, but I was selling the product in California. My first prize was a silk shawl which I gave to my sister Alice who lived with me. She was working in the Goodyear plant.
One time a gal invited me into a flat in north Los Angeles. She said, "Sure, come on in, honey." I found out quick that I was in the wrong place. Pretty soon I had about four of these girls around me. I was older than any of them, but they could see that I was really a boy scout in the wrong place as far as they were concerned. One girl, as I was leaving, said, "Oh, give the kid an order." I'll never forget that place.
I could see immediately that my job had no future. It's true that Mr. Wilkins, who had the franchise in Los Angeles, was doing all right. He employed about twenty-five people of all sorts, housewives and young people, who would sell their friends and then drift on. He got the biggest percentage of what his workers sold. I decided that there wasn't any future in that.
My next career--I was watching the ads--was to be a vacuum cleaner salesman. I applied for and got the job. Their training was hard-sell. The superintendent would load up six or seven of us in his car and drive out to some section. He would turn us loose to work for the morning, and maybe the afternoon too. It was very tiring work. Sometimes he would stick around to pick us up and sometimes he wouldn't.
The salesmen really had to be horse traders to work for that outfit because we were told to pick on the elderly people and others who were somewhat defenseless. I remember one of our foremen or superintendents, as they were called, was teaching us how to get into the house and how to sell by showing customers the differences between their old vacuum cleaners and our new ones. The company had special ways to bugger up the customer's machine so that it wouldn't work then and would never work again. Meanwhile our machine would pick up this stuff readily and theirs would not. I had some interesting experiences while employed there. But when I found out about their tactics, I quit them.
I'll tell the story about how my wife Jean and I first met. I always figured that persuading her to marry me was the best sale I ever made. I hadn't been working for the vacuum cleaner place very long. The vacuum cleaner outfit gave out assignments each week to one of the major stores. I was sent to the May Company which invited in demonstrators because they did not have a department to sell vacuum cleaners. I was installed near one of the entrances with a table. My job was to gather the people together and sell them my product.
One day I noticed a girl standing there. She had on a black smock. All at once, without any warning, in front of all those people, she blurted out, "You sound just like a Mormon missionary." I stood there a little confused, and somebody else asked some questions, and when I looked up again, she was gone.
It turned out that my brother Ivan had told Hortense and Blaine Steed that I was coming home from my mission. Hortense had told her sister Jean that she thought we should meet. Jean knew I was selling vacuum cleaners and saw that I looked like Ivan. She guessed that I was Ivan's brother, the returned missionary, and that explains the introduction.
When I got my break--we were to take a break every thirty minutes or so to work the crowd, I wandered around the store. I never did find her. She said later that I hadn't tried hard enough. That was how we first met.
In the meantime, I tried to investigate other things to do. I recall that I came very close to working for what was called National Thrift. The sales manager was the stake president, Leo J. Muir. I have four of his books about the Church in California which he compiled much later. These historical books, two large ones and two smaller ones, have pictures of my family in them.
National Thrift was an investment and real estate agency. The salesmen would call on people in their homes and sell them on the idea of buying stock. Muir would handle the money and transactions. The whole business failed later on, and I was glad that I never got into it. Leo J. Muir practically lost his membership in the Church. He was honest, but he was in with some marginal people. The president of the company got away with a share of money when he saw things were going bad. Leo J. Muir, in his efforts to save the company, went up and down areas of Utah and Idaho and got Church friends and widows and others to invest their savings. He thought he was going to save the business, but instead they all lost their money.
Neither of these house-to-house jobs was to my liking. I had had a very long spell of canvassing as a missionary, and I had had enough. I investigated other possibilities, and I got the idea that I might work in one of the stores. I got the address of the head office of a grocery store chain called Piggley Wiggley. The firm pioneered the super-market concept. People came in through one gate, went down various aisles and circled around to get out. The store had no clerks, only a man at the register. Everything was priced and stacked on shelves. The stores had started out in the south and were relatively new to the Los Angeles area. Some years later, Safeway bought them. After Clarence Saunders, the owner, sold the company, he came back and tried to start another company with a different name and a few different angles. He was sued by the Safeway organization, and I think he was put out of business.
Jobs were somewhat short in 1928, but there weren't as many people out of work as later. I remember that I didn't have too much trouble getting employment. I was ready to work and I was clean enough and didn't look too bad, and so I was hired by Piggley Wiggley.
My introduction into the grocery business went like this. I was hired and told to go out to store number so and so. I presented myself and the fellow said, "All right, go over there and handle the cash register." I admitted that I'd never run a cash register. And he cussed me out and said, "So they send me one of you guys." I had never even touched a cash register. I had put my best side forward when they hired me, of course, and I hadn't told them all that I didn't know. So I told him to put me on something else until I learned how to run his machine. He sent me over to the fruit stand. They just had cash drawers on that end of the business.
So, I worked on fruit and vegetables. The store had an interesting process there called inventory A's and D's., advances and declines. I'd never heard of such a thing before. Every week I had to inventory my fruit stand and tell where I was. I also had to make an accounting of the cash. I inventoried at the cash prices, but as there was a certain amount of pilfering, spoilage and other losses that could not be made up, it was impossible to get ahead. The only way a person could make the fruit stand run was by cheating and illegal manipulating which they showed me how to do. To deal with an advance and a rise of two cents this week, I had to tell them that I had a third less on hand. That would be successful. When there were declines in the prices, the procedure was reversed. I had more on hand of the merchandise. If the price of eggs went down a penny or two pennies and I had twenty dozen on hand, I would say I had more. This was the only way the store could show a profit.
I was on my fruit stand in the Huntington Park area for about five months. It seemed that many people were visiting their relatives in Los Angeles and sightseeing and going back home. They were intrigued by many of the foods that we had in the market which they had never seen before. Avocados were new then; I couldn't stand the taste of them at first. Grapefruit was not well known in the east at all. Other things were new. One of these people came in, planning to leave the next day, and asked me to make up a bag of fruit for him. I quickly figured out that that was a way we could raise the price on certain things. I talked the manager into getting me some baskets. I had not seen fancy baskets before except for candy and dried fruits. I used to fix up these baskets with fruit assortments and sell them to visitors who would come in. I'd price these somewhat over the regular sales price of fruit, and I began to make some good profits.
One day the local superintendent came out and told me he wanted to put me in charge of a store. He said he had a good one, a fast-moving one, right across from the Goodyear plant where my sister Alice was working. She worked a night shift, and I never did get to see her there.
When he made me manager of the store, I had four fellows working for me. We had a thriving business. We made big profits on cigarettes which we sold by the barrel full. About a thousand people worked at the Goodyear plant, and they would come in and buy these cigarettes and also lots of candy. But I found out that I also had some problems. Some of these people came over in groups and would walk around and stuff things into their pockets. We put the razor blades and small things and crab cans and high priced meats up by the cash register. I can still recall cornering a couple of fellows. Another time a big black mammy had stuffed all kinds of things down her huge front. I saw her doing it and confronted her. She protested her innocence. I couldn't search her, but I held her until I could get the officers there. She had a lot of stuff. Shoplifting was a major problem.
We worked the A's and D's to make up those balances and did not have too bad a shortage. We worked very hard. Every holiday we had to stock shelves. I remember one Christmas or New Years taking inventory. Every three months we had to take inventory of the whole store. The inventory of the fruit and vegetables had to be done every week. I had been there just less than a year total.
We turned in our inventory one time, and they found a big shortage. They sent a couple of fellows from the main office to check it to see if we had made a mistake. They came down, and went through the store, checking to see if we had left things in the backroom or somewhere, and we were still off. The superintendent was very concerned about our operation. So a third inventory was made, and it was still short.
I was summoned to the main office. The fellow in charge, the big boss, was a huge man by the name of Jones. This big man bellowed out, as soon as I got in the door, "Well, Lauper, what did you do with it?" I do have to say that they had had troubles with some of the managers who had gotten away with some money. But I said no, I had not taken any money or goods. Of course I was bonded. When they made me manager they had put me under bond so that there could be no loss to the store. He said, "Well, if you didn't, how about your men? Which of them would have driven up a truck and hauled the stuff away?" He was adamant, and he kept on, and I kept on. It was a stand-off as far as I was concerned.
I came back to my store and still carried on there. The superintendent felt very bad about it. He said he couldn't understand it. He said he believed me and wondered whether one of the other men had gotten away with something. This went on for another week. Then all at once, one day, he came whooping in with his hat waving in the air, and said, "It's all right. It's all right, Lauper. Everything's all right!" My store was number 68, and they had a store out in Hollywood, number 86. Clerks in the head office had transposed the numbers, and I had been charged for a whole truckload that had gone out to this other store. That was the reason for the shortage.
But then I began to figure that there was no future there. I had had it up to the top of my head with that company. I was working so hard and was still accused of being a thief. I had been promised a share of the profits, but they had never materialized. I was working long hours and holidays for only $135 a month.
I was then keeping company with my future wife. We weren't really going together because we spent so much time quarreling. I thought that I had lost her for sure one day when she told me that she and another women had been picked out of the entire May Company store where she worked to go East to St. Louis to learn some special dressmaking skills. They sent her back to Missouri to a nice hotel with deluxe treatment and full salary and some bonuses. I wrote her some letters while she was gone, and she didn't even answer.
I felt bad. I was eating too many candy bars. I used to eat a lot of Hershey bars with almonds then, but I can't stand them now. I got shingles, and people told me that nerves were the cause. I never did go to the doctor. I still have scars on my back from those shingles.
While I was in this state, Jean came back from St. Louis where she had made good. She had been working in the May Company's fabric department, selling yardage. Someone in the store got the idea that the store would sell more yardage if demonstrations were given. A woman would come in and decide about some material, and as an incentive, an employee would give some quick education on how to sew it up into a dress. These were simple dresses of light material. Jean and another girl were chosen to do the demonstrations because they already knew quite a bit about sewing. That's why they were sent to St. Louis.
When she came back, I was invited out to her sister Hortense's house to dinner to meet her brother Fair (Fairfax) Gordon, who had been working for a short time for a new company. I remember him explaining about what a wonderful company it was. The company gave their prospective salesmen a training course at a salary. I had never heard of anything like that before--a company that would give you a salary just to go to school to learn their business. I thought that was marvelous, and I got interested right away. I started asking questions. Fair was a very nice fellow, but he was arrogant and egotistical. In the course of his conversation to me, right there in front of everybody, he said it was a very good company, but that I could never make it. He just came right out and told me that.
Well, that was a pretty heavy splash in the face. I didn't like it at all. I made up my mind that if there was any chance, I was going to work for that company. So as well as the fact that I was interested in what they offered, I just had to prove he was wrong. I didn't talk to him any more about it, but I started investigating, and I found out that the company held classes periodically. From its western base in Los Angeles, the company was expanding and spreading out across the United States. Classes began about every sixty days.
So early on, even while I was working for Piggley Wiggley, I was also interested in this company. When I had trouble at the store and was accused of stealing, I thought I couldn't bear to let this other opportunity get away. They hired five or six people and gave them sales training that would last anywhere from three to five months. I found out when the next classes started. One class had just graduated and another was being hired when I applied. I was interviewed by the sales manager, a man named Jones. He took down all the details of my story about being an ex-missionary and my varied sales experience. He asked whether I had had any experience in accounting or in selling his kind of merchandise. Of course, I had none. He said, "Well, I'll let you know if we want you," and brushed me off.
I went back again. An extra group began training within thirty days, two classes at the same time. I had heard about that as I was keeping track of the company. This time when I went back, I couldn't see Jones. I got along very well with a fellow named Griswold who was the city sales manager; he was very friendly. But he said that the class was filled, and the company wouldn't be able to consider me at all. So that was that.
About a month and a half later, I found out that another class was coming up. While I was waiting on one of my customers, I felt that the hour had come, and I went over to one of the pay telephones hanging on the wall and plugged it in. I called up and got Jones and told him who I was. He started cussing and swearing, "But I told you that if I wanted you I would send for you and let you know. And I told you that you had better stay with your cans." I said, "Yes sir, Mr. Jones," and I was mad then too, "but this is much more important to me than it is to you."
Well, he started chuckling and laughing right on the phone. He said, "All right, you come on down." So luck was with me when I went in. He looked me over again, shook his head, and signed me up.
The Hadley Company specialized in loose-leaf accounting systems, grandly referring to themselves as the Pathfinders of the Pacific. The plant was established on the site of the fort of the original pathfinder, John C. Fremont. We tailored accounting systems to all businesses, large or small. For the larger companies we worked with accountants, sometimes with CPA firms.
Charles R. Hadley had been a salesman for the Baker Vater Company, the first firm to sell loose-leaf records. That company had built the first loose-leaf binders. Vater was a blacksmith and Baker was a banker, and the two of them worked out a system to keep sheets in order on a board with two posts.
Hadley's territory was everything west of the Mississippi River. He sold mostly to banks and railroads. Then the United States government passed the first income tax law in 1913. That made it imperative that businesses keep records to prove transactions. The idea of loose-leaf records was in competition with the established idea that everything had to be in bound books. Bound ledgers were awkward because the different sections of information were used unevenly. Loose-leaf records allowed records to be arranged for the convenience of the business. People originally felt that loose-leaf records would lend themselves to fraud. But in actuality the fraud problem is not in loose pages, but in failing to enter the transaction.
Charles R. Hadley saw that the idea of accounting and loose-leaf records with binders had come. These would answer the government insistence that everybody have records. His simple forms of cash receipts, check records, bank statements, purchases, sales, and general journal are still in use. He also added records of different sizes and kept them all as standard forms. We would carry demonstration records and be able to give a firm, depending on its size, a wide choice of individual records. We had a business that would provide repeat sales regularly in various firms.
Other governmental changes mandated additional records, and the company also got into lithography running multiple statements and even envelopes all laid out in a big sheet. In its pioneering days, lithography meant that the engraving was made on a stone and transferred from that to a zinc plate and by chemical processing onto paper. I never did get into that part of the business, but I started right away selling statements, receipts, purchase orders, and even letterheads and envelopes. Early on we had window envelopes which were not readily available to people in the commercial world. We had a franchise with the Transo Envelope Company, and they manufactured a lot of different envelopes. I didn't sell as many of the accounting records as I did the semi-finished, or personalized, forms. These ran into bigger money than the standard forms and accounting records. The Charles R. Hadley Company was the company that I had been so eager to get into and where I was to spend the greater part of my professional life.
I had a tough time in the training class because I was then going with Jean a little too much. We were on fairly good terms, and I spent too many evenings there. I wasn't getting enough sleep at night, and I started sleeping in class. It was a rough thing to try to get away with, and I remember how lucky I was one time when the teacher was giving a demonstration and started asking me questions. I had dozed when he asked, "How about you, Lauper?" I said, "Cash received." It was the luckiest guess. I'd heard him speak about that, and everybody knew that I didn't know what I was saying. The instructor knew it too, although I did give him the right answer. They all laughed.
I was one of the six members in our class. There was Danny Lamoreaux, an ex-sewing machine salesman. He had had quite a bit of experience and was really a likeable little fellow. I thought later on that he was the one I liked best. He was a positive guy, and I could talk to him. There was Gordon Guthrie, the only college man in the group. He was a pretty smooth boy and a smart fellow. He had had some accounting training. There was Hughes, an ex-hardware salesman. He had been hired along the beaches of Florida when Johnny Jones was down there recruiting. He had a long experience of selling hardware and was a serious salesman. They got to be drinking buddies. Then there was Clarence Engels. He had been in the knitting goods business with his uncle. He had worked in offices and knew about business and selling. There was a fellow by the name of Don Posey. He was an ex-marine, the biggest, the tallest, the best-looking, the dressiest of the group, and the smartest. He could remember everything and give a better demonstration than the class leader could. So Don Posey was kind of a hero. That was our group of six.
Don Posey was the first one of the class to be picked and sent out. Some of the others were still in training. I was assigned to sit at the front desk in the main office where they put the rookies to give them a little experience with anyone who came in off the street. We were learning to write up orders. I was on that spot for about three weeks with Danny Lamoreaux. Some others had been sent out.
Don Posey was sent down to Texas, I remember. We had been two weeks on the front desk when a wire came from Posey saying that he needed more money. Don had gotten into a poker game and lost the money he had been sent out with. Then he got into some more trouble. The company brought him back in before I was sent out, and then he was sent up into the state of Washington. In no time at all he was borrowing money from some of our customers. He started to pick up girls. The last I heard about him, he was on trial, and he ended up in the penitentiary because he had written some bad checks. For all his promise, he didn't do too well.
The company sent Gordon Guthrie, the college man, to San Francisco. He took a room in the Palace Hotel, arranged his samples there, and then sent out some letters and asked the customers to come in and see him. He was just too lazy to work. He didn't want to carry his sample bag and get out and call on the customers. So he didn't last.
Danny Lamoreaux was sent up to Spokane, and ended up being sick. He couldn't take the travelling. They had to let him go. He was in Seattle when he was finally washed out. I don't think Jim Russell, the manager up there, liked him from the start, although Jones, the sales manager, did. Ben Hughes got trapped in one of those office buildings up there and couldn't find his way out. He'd go into one door and come back through another. We told some sad stories about him because he never could learn the business. He was a hardware salesman and could sell hardware, but he never could learn the loose-leaf or accounting business. He was in Hartford the last I heard of him.
I finally was sent out. One morning I came to my desk and there was Frank Barnhill, the chairman of the board, the boss-man of the company. He said, "Well, Mr. Lauper, we're sending you up into Oregon. We've tried to tell you a little about the company, but you'll really learn the business from your customers. We'd like you to call on these customers in such a way that they will be glad to see you in five years." Then he walked away. I've never forgotten it. That's the last I saw of him until some years later. By that time we had gotten acquainted through letters. He had had me write articles for the company paper. They knew I was a member of the Church. I remember I started one article out, "It might be a surprise to some, but in the Good Book is one of the major selling sentences." I built on the idea that "In all your getting, get understanding." He liked that. He wrote me a nice letter. Then I had a good sales record one month and I was invited down to Los Angeles and took the family. We had pictures taken in the office there.
I was very busy time getting ready to leave for my territory. On the last day, after I had talked to Mr. Barnhill, I called Jean and told her that I had been assigned to the Oregon territory. I was told that I was being sent up there because I was a single man. I told Jean that I would be leaving Monday, and it was then Friday. She said, "Why don't you come over to dinner on Sunday?" As I said, Jean and I had trouble getting along and had not been seeing each other. I had told my sister Alice never, never to even mention Jean's name again. But I said I'd go to dinner.
We met then on a Sunday afternoon and we had the chance to visit while walking in a little park near her home. We had our picture taken that day. I still think Jean's is one of the prettiest things I've seen. We had no idea at the moment that we were going to get married.
During the dinner we talked about different things. Her father and her mother were there and Jean and I, the four of us. All at once, without any warning or build-up, without any lead-in, Mother Gordon just turned to Jean and said, "Well, are you and Serge getting married before he leaves?" I still remember that. She turned and looked at me, and I looked at her, and I said, "Well, how about it?" She just nodded her head.
Then we had the problem of trying to figure out who would marry us. I had had the marriage license for about six months, but we hadn't been on good terms long enough during that time to get married. I started phoning different people I knew: the bishop was gone, his counselors were gone. The stake president was gone. It was October 6, and everybody had gone to conference in Salt Lake City.
Finally, late in the evening I got hold of a man named Sconberg, a counselor in the Long Beach Stake. I called him and told him my story, how I was leaving the next day. He said that he would perform the marriage. He was about fifteen or twenty miles away.
We met at Hortense and Blaine Steed's place about 10:30 that night and stood in front of the piano. I remember Jean sobbed through the whole ceremony. She was emotional besides being upset about all the trouble we had had to get the thing arranged. I was in a difficult frame of mind myself; I didn't know what I was getting into. Sconberg's wife was a would-be opera singer and she sang, "O Promise Me." I've hated the song ever since. She couldn't really sing at all.
We went back to our place about 12:30. Ivan was on a mission in Great Britain by this time, and I was living with Alice in a little house off Florence Avenue in Los Angeles. The next morning Alice was pretty dumfounded when I introduced her to my wife.
Then I said goodbye, got into my car, and headed for Oregon. I had two days to get up there. I had a little Star car. I bought it the last year they made cars named Star, and it didn't go very fast.
I was on my way to Oregon. The day before, on October 6, 1929, I had gotten married. I was headed up into the Oregon territory, a place I had never been, selling a new product, as a married man. I had a lot of mixed feelings, of course, and I wondered what in the world I had done it all for and what I had gotten myself into.
But I drove to San Francisco the first day and then headed on to Oregon where I was to meet my new sales manager. I checked into the Heathman Hotel in Portland where I met Larry Gleaves, the sales manager who had been brought out from New York. Our relationship was bad from the start. Neither of us liked the other at all.
It had been raining for days. We drove off in my car, and the cloth top of it leaked. We hardly talked the fifty miles to Hood River where we made some business calls. We took rooms in the hotel, and later on at dinner, he told me flat out that I was not going to make it as a salesman. The miles with the leaky roof had not helped his disposition.
He had me come to his room in the evening and asked me many product questions, mostly about lithography. This was the part of the business about which I was the least prepared. I finally left his room about 9pm. I felt very bad. The rain had stopped, so I went out for a walk.
I passed the Coulter Motor Company office where we had been given an order for some business forms earlier that day. I was surprised to see through the glass show windows that Mr. Coulter was at his desk at the far end of the room. I rapped on the glass, and he let me in. He remembered me from our call that afternoon. I told him I wanted to buy a car. "Good," he said, "Let's pick one out." He offered me an excellent deal on a red Ford. I accepted. "Well, how would you like to pay?" I told him that I had no money, but that I would give him my Star car as a down payment. His manner changed at once. "That bucket of bolts?" He had seen my car because it was parked in his garage. He told me that the Star Motor Company was out of business.
I was new with my company, and I was not a good prospect to buy his car. I decided to level with him and tell him a little of my background. I told him how I had fought to get the job, that my boss Larry Gleaves did not like me and was peeved about the rain and the leaky car. Finally, he smiled and said, "Kid, I'm going to bet on you."
The next morning I had an early breakfast and was waiting for Gleaves when he was ready to drive to the next town. He was surprised when I drove up in the new car, but he did not ask about it. I didn't say anything either.
Our next stop was The Dalles, and Gleaves went to make some phone calls. I parked the car and left word that I would be back in an hour. I told myself that this was it. I was going to get an order. I took my price book and some printing samples and started my first cold canvas, not calling on customers who knew the Charles R. Hadley Company. My second call was a florist shop. No, the owner did not need statements or envelopes, but I booked an order for 1,000 triplicate receipts with the company name imprinted, a $31 order in those days. I went back to the hotel and showed Gleaves. He told me that he had to go back to Seattle and went off to catch a bus. I never saw him again. Gleaves returned to New York, and Jim Russell took his place.
I continued on the road and made my way around the territory which consisted of all of Oregon with the exception of Portland and McMinnville. The sequence of the trip was Hood River, the Dalles, Arlington, then Pendleton, LeGrand, then down into Baker and later on as far as Klamath and over to Prineville and Bend and then to Grant's Pass, Corvallis, Eugene, Salem and then back into Portland which was actually the headquarters.
Then I decided that this life was absolutely crazy. I was a married man and my wife of one half day was in Los Angeles. I was not too eager to write letters, although I had written a couple. So I decided to send a telegram, not knowing what would happen. I asked my wife to meet me in Roseburg, the next stop. I think I wired her from Bend. When I got over to Grant's Pass, I got the return telegram with the word that she would meet me at Roseburg.
The plan had been that she was going to stay and work in Los Angeles at the May Company and support her mother and dad because they didn't have any income. But my telegram broke the pattern, and she decided that she would come. Her sister Hortense Steed was going to help pick up the slack with her folks. Anyway, I got the word that she was coming to meet me.
Roseburg was a smallish place and had a small hotel, but I was already acquainted with the manager who had been very friendly the first time around. I told him I was meeting my wife who was coming in from Los Angeles on the train. I left the hotel and went to the train station. I can still remember when she got off the train, a stranger to me in many ways. I had a lot of funny feelings, and neither of us said much. We got into my little car and went back to the hotel to our room. Lo and behold! The manager of the hotel had arranged a beautiful bouquet of flowers and also a big bowl of fruit, all kinds of fruit, I don't know where he got it all. It was an ice-breaker. Jean thought that I had arranged it, and I got all the credit. It worked out very well for me.
Then, after that, Jean learned to drive a car, with a very short amount of training, and she did all the driving. I would curl up on a seat, and when we got there I would be ready for my calls. She would usually take in a show, often the same one she had seen in the last town.
At most hotels I would get a courtesy rate for her. I would pay for my room, and she could stay free of charge because she was my wife. We were in Corvallis one time, and I had had a disappointing time trying to get some business that day. I remember I thought I would just come back to the hotel. We were up in our room when the phone rang, and the desk clerk said that my sales manager Jim Russell was down in the lobby. I had never met him before. I had been around the territory, and we had gotten acquainted by letter. He had complimented me on one or two sales that I had made. It was the middle of the day, and I certainly wasn't expecting him at the hotel.
He kidded me a little when I said I wanted him to meet my wife. He said sure, I want to meet her. He was a real sales manager, very sharp. After he and Jean had talked a little bit, he said he wanted to take us to dinner that night. We started out on a good basis. I think I did introduce my wife as Jean Gordon, with her maiden name. Later, he told it around that Lauper didn't know his own wife's name. For the moment I wasn't in the best of mentality.