A memory, naturally from the past. 1957, we had come back to Dayton from Nevada, and I was job hunting, and took a job with Royal Typewriter in the Dayton branch. I had sold typewriters for a while in Oregon, so was somewhat familiar with the industry.
Floyd Rorick was the manager. I went through a "training" week, and was ready to go. This was 1957, the electric typewriter was the thing to have, but only IBM had perfected them during the war, and they were far superior to any other on the market. Sweden had one that was pretty good, but not as good as the IBM. In our "sales pitch" we even used the phrase, "similar to an IBM."
Each morning, prior to heading out, we would pick a sample machine to be used for demos, take it to service to make sure everything worked, all the "automatic" features, then, like automatic periods, hold the period key down and it perform like a machine gun, sometimes. It was embarrassing to tell a prospectice buyer, "And here, we have the automatic hyphen," hit the key, and nothing. You would then, put the cover on the machine, pick it up, and head out the door.
After training, my first call, I had decided, was to a company, a real estate land development company, out on Far Hills Avenue, and the office manager, was a patient of my Dads. Each salesman had an exclusive territory, mine turned out to be an area I was familiar with.
I remember checking out my machine, everything worked, carefully carried it out to the car, gently placed it in the trunk, on soft blankets, and drove out to Oakwood. I think the Royal office was in an office complex in the North end of Dayton.
I entered, introduced myself, "Oh you're my Doctors son," come on in.
"Well, I see you have many desks here, all with Royal Standard Typewriters, I would like to show you our newest Electric Typewriter, we are running a special on them for a short while," or something clever, to that effect. I sat it down, everything worked, so I cleverly set my order pad on her desk .... sat back, ready to go in to my pitch .... "We'll take eight of them."
"What?" ..... and she ordered eight of them. Part of the deal was they got a nice "credit" for the trade-in, but they did not have to have a trade-in.
I went back to the office, Mr. Rorick asked how I had done, "I sold eight electrics.
On my first day, eight electrics, the entire agency had not sold that many, eight trade-ins they didn't need, so we had those to sell with no money in them. IF, I had been smart, I could have kept them and sold them .... IF....... Wright Patterson AFB was also in my territory, not as much commission, but still made money on their sales, and did nothing to get the sale. That month they order quite a few Standards.
We didn't even have eight electrics, we had to call around Ohio to find someone who had some. My first month, I made the MAD club, a machine a day, BIG commission check, I was the fair haired boy around the office ... what a great salesman I was ..... when in reality, I had done little to nothing ... what I did with all that money is another story ................
