Being a door-to-door salesman in old-time Phoenix


I'm too young to have ever seen door-to-door salesmen, like the Fuller Brush Man, but I definitely remember seeing them in the funnies, especially when Dagwood Bumstead would kick one. And my parents' generation had to deal with them, and from what I understand they were a very common pest.

You really don't see many door-to-door salesmen anymore, in spite of the signs on many doors that say "No Soliciting". Speaking for myself, since I have a peephole in my front door if I see someone carrying a clipboard and wearing a polo shirt, I wait until they go away, which they do.

And of course now I'm thinking about what it would have been like to have been a door-to-door salesman in old-time Phoenix. Let's time-travel to 1922, ring some doorbells, and sell some Fuller Brushes.

I'm a personable and nice-looking young man (at least my mom thinks so), so I really have all of the tools that I need for this job. I have a nice white dress shirt with a small blue twill, neatly pressed (thanks, mom!), a tie that my dad lent me, slacks, comfortable brogues, and of course my suitcase of samples, my order pad, and my pencil.

"Hello, ma'am..." SLAM!

"Hmm... I think we should try the next house."

"Hello, sir, I'm working my way through college. Have you ever wondered if a Fuller brush would..." SLAM!

"Hello, little girl! Are any adults home here? What? No one ain't here? Where's your grammar? Oh I see, she ain't here, either!

Thank you for helping me be a door-to-door salesman in old-time Phoenix!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more