In June, 1957, I said my good-byes to the family, packed up my suitcase, and, with my soon-to-be roommate, Fred Selby, piled into the car of our Bible-selling recruiter, Carl Reed, to make the trip to sales school in Nashville, TN, home of the Southwestern Bible Company.  My summer’s experience was not as financially productive as I had hoped, and there were challenging difficulties along the way.  Consequently, I came to see and accept some of my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, learned how to cope with unexpected difficult circumstances, and made discoveries that turned out to be helpful in years to come—and in the process produced some good personal anecdotes. 

In that era, the Southwestern Company had hundreds, maybe thousands of young men of college age selling for them in a kind of pyramid system.  That is, a portion of the profits for each salesman accrued to those who recruited them, and so on up the line.  In this way, young men who had several crews reporting to them could do quite well.  I recruited nobody and was not myself recruited to return the next summer.

After sales school (conducted by a slick super-salesman who later was indicted for some questionable business dealings), Fred and I were assigned to the town of Mt. Vernon, OH.  We found room and board in a residential house that had three rooms for rent, the other two occupied by elderly gentlemen with whom Fred and I had conversation from time to time.  We set out immediately to get town and county maps with which to plan our sales activities and checked in with the local authorities, which was protocol for all Southwest salesmen.  We were very disappointed to find that there was a restriction on door-to-door selling in the city limits of Mt. Vernon, so we were forced to sell in the outskirts of town or to hitch-hike to nearby towns without sales restrictions to pursue our enterprise.  We both did a lot of walking that summer.

We established ourselves with a local Church of Christ and were well received there as we attended each Sunday morning and sometimes went to week-night activities.  I remember being allowed to lead singing a few times and participating in Bible classes.  It was in one of the week-night activities that I first engaged in bowling, and I had beginner’s luck by throwing a couple of successive strikes, a feat I have repeated only rarely and don’t remember ever exceeding. 

Meanwhile, on the sales front, I tried some of the techniques we were taught at sales school.  Get the name of the first person who will talk to you on a street and use that name when you approach the next-door neighbor.  “Mrs. Jones, I’ve just been talking to your neighbor Mrs. Brown, about reading the Bible, and I’d like to share with you also how some books I have will make your Bible study richer.”  Or walk up to a door, and if somebody answers, say, “What beautiful flowers you have, how do you make them so healthy?”  If you manage to get inside and actually show some books, say, “This comes two colors; which one do you prefer?  Good, now let’s look at leather covers and hardbacks.  Which of those do you prefer?”  If they look the least bit interested, get out your order book and begin writing.  “Do you prefer paying cash today, or writing a check?  What delivery date is best for you?”  I rarely closed a sale this way, but I thought I had to try.

A few weeks into my stay in Mt. Vernon, I came down with mumps and had to stay in for almost two weeks, so that put a big kink in my income for the summer.  During this confinement, I was regaled by the two older guys in the rooming house with stories of grotesque swellings in adults who had mumps, and in more intimate places than the jaws.  My case, I am happy to say, was unremarkable.  I don’t really remember how I spent that time, but  since we didn’t have a TV, I assume I did a lot of reading.  It was probably on this occasion that I read some Jehovah’s Witnesses material that I came across, in which I first encountered their argument that Jesus was created by God (“the firstborn of all creation”) and was not the eternal, co-existent  Son of God.  Some of the resistance of people to talk to anyone who came to their door arose from their having been visited frequently and rather insistently by Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

I truly enjoyed meeting people, when they would let me in the house, and later, when the books I sold had to be delivered by others because I had been called home to be with my dying father, the recipients seemed truly concerned at not seeing me again.  Sometimes I would talk to people in stores and on the street just to get a feel for what a town was like.  I usually took a sack lunch along with me, but I needed to go to a store for something to drink and a little dessert treat; as I sat outside and ate, I would observe people going past.  I remember specifically sitting outside a store across from Gambier College in Gambier, OH, and eating my Twinkies while I watched the students going in and out.  I never went through the gates myself.

Other than the mumps, the summer was very healthy for me, because I walked miles on country roads, where the houses were up to a mile apart.  That was actually pleasant, since it was quiet and punctuated only by birdsong and the occasional passing car.  The residents were a bit more laid back and less suspicious than town folk.  I don’t think I was a very threatening sight with my little brown sample case, walking in from the dusty road.

My summer of selling Bibles and aids to Bible studies (I still have and use my Nave’s Topical Bible) came to an early end when I received a call from my sister-in-law in Rule, TX, that my father was dying and that I had better come back home to see him.  I had to ride the bus, since I didn’t have enough money to take the train, and it took me a couple of days to make the trip, sleeping on the bus.  Though my father was very frail, he actually lived until I had to go to the campus of the school I had decided to attend for my college education, Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University), about 60 miles from Rule.  I was able to find two part-time jobs during the last few weeks before classes began, one with the College maintenance department ground crew driving a dump truck, for which I was qualified by still having the commercial license attained when I drove the school bus back in Rule.  My other job was working the soda fountain in a drug store across the street from the campus.

I remember very well receiving a piece of mail that put the official end to my summer of Bible-selling: I got a check from the Southwest Company for $220, my net profit from my summer’s work in Ohio.  Not a very remarkable reward for all my efforts, but it was better than being in debt to the Company.  In spite of my small earnings in this job, I have often harked back to the good experience I gained, and my knowledge of sales techniques has enabled me to ward off more than one salesman who knocked at my own door; but if they were young and nervous, I was gentle in my rejection.

I got news that my father had died during the week of Freshman Orientation at A.C.C.  I went back to Rule for the funeral and a period of mourning with the family, and my leaving home after that marked the beginning of my academic career.  Fred Selby and I continued rooming together in an old army barrack that served as the poor boys’ dormitory at A.C.C.  I will be describing my college experiences in my next installment of Autobiographical Musings.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)