“You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there’s no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine.
He’s a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple spots on your hat and your finished. Nobody does blame this man. A salesman has got to dream boy, it comes with the territory.”
~ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
When you spend as many years as I did at a company like T.J. Raney and Sons, one column just isn’t enough space to tell all the stories (maybe not even a year’s worth of columns). When I started thinking back last week, on my time there with the great Winston Faulkner and his son Jimmy Red, and other close friends like Jim Liles, John Showalter and Joe Owen, the memories came back.
I remember some of the older southern gentlemen who worked there, who kept their clients pages in large black leather bound binders known as call books. “Quit fanning yourself and call somebody,” Willie Hickerson would say as his giant NFL-like body lumbered down the wide middle aisle, flanked on each side by pairs of desks and their occupants, nicknamed “Daddy’s” by the outside world. He referred to our turning pages in the call books, searching for that whale who was surely waiting for our call.
I remember Dick Lawrence, one of the first guys I sat by. Dick was a former radio guy who took a liking to my deep greenness and tried to give me some help along the way. Nearby sat Bob Gebhardt, a funny little Barney Rubble looking guy who covered his bare feet in alligator skin.
On the other side of the room was Mark Schmidt, another dapper, pin striped, cuff linked, silk handkerchief salesman who had migrated the 200 miles west from Memphis. In front of him was Big E, Eric Westerman, who was later joined by his Sigma Nu brothers, Ernie Bruton and Frank Elmo “Rusty” Sparks.
“Rusty is lying up there, half-dead in his hospital bed and he’s selling more bonds than the rest of you combined,” pronounced our sales manager Thomas V. “Tommy” Harkins, one morning. Tommy referred to the losing collision Rusty had in his aluminum sports car with the granite corner of the building at 2nd and Scott.
Frank Surguine stood nearby, in his baby blue seersucker and white bucks, thumbing through a Wall Street Journal and sucking deeply on a Marlboro. “What’s the long bond doing?” Surguine would always ask on coming down on the bond floor from his private office upstairs in underwriting.
Joe and Surguine would sometimes ride the bus from downtown back to their homes in Hillcrest and the Heights. Joe Mama told me Surguine sometimes carried a silver martini shaker in his briefcase for that long journey.
There were others, like Earl Young. “Hey Sugar Britches, let me talk to him,” said Earl every morning into the black phone. Earl told me once that he thought one of his bank customers was going to erect a statue of him on the bank’s front lawn because he had made them so much money. Not sure if that ever happened but Earl had me convinced it would.
Earl was a great salesman. There were many great salesmen who came through those doors. They came, stayed for a while, and they moved on, “riding a smile and a shoeshine.”