When I was in Cub Scouts, our pack co-sponsored a minstrel show, with us selling tickets to our families and neighbors, first prize being a new bicycle. I sold tirelessly every afternoon after school and all day weekends, wearing my Cub Scout shirt and knocking on doors far afield from my own. If the lady (it was almost always a lady) answering had some lame excuse like “We have other plans that night”, I would say in my best sad-orphan voice “Well, won’t you buy just one ticket to support the Cub Scouts?”. This worked pretty well, and, after all, the tickets were only two dollars.
I got tired of selling tickets and stopped a week before the show. When my “friend” and fellow Scout “Glen” asked how many I had sold, I answered honestly with (as I recall) “176”. A week later “Glen” had sold 180 and had himself a new bike.
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
In our busload of newly-sworn recruits, most have volunteered for the draft, to get their military obligation over with and move on with their lives. I have signed up mainly out of boredom, and once thought I might even put in 20 years and retire. Our Fort Dix training sergeants immediately begin working to break us down and resocialize us to army life, starting with the bus trip from the reception center to our new home in the E-company barracks. Sergeant Santiago is our host on the bus ride; he is a bantam-weight tyrant who does his best to terrorize us.
After keeping our platoon awake until four in the morning hand-waxing the barracks floor to prepare for an inspection, our cadre of trainers have an idea – if we each pitch in $2, we can buy a used electric floor- buffer from a place they know of in town. They can get it right now; we can owe them until payday. We’re all for it of course, we don’t want to go through that again, and we buy a buffer that’s probably been sold to a dozen earlier training cycles.
courtesy thecmp.org
We learn to march, salute, and fire the M1 rifle, good fun that last one. However, I a become a victim of “M1 thumb”, a painful but temporary disfigurement.
Loading the M1 Garand rifle, courtesy m1-garand-rifle.com
During basic training we are out in the field for a week, sleeping in tents. During drill one rainy day, a few of us sneak off into a tent. Sergeant Johnson rips open the tent flap and threatens us with court martial and prison for “buggin’ out” of duty.
While drinking watered-down beer at the Post Exchange, we hear that one of our sergeants, a lifer, has just signed up for three more years. Since he seems otherwise normal, we ask him why. He asks where else could he get drunk and lose all his money every month, yet still have a place to sleep and three meals a day?
Our oldest sergeant is a grizzled Korean War vet. Overseeing our cleaning of the latrine, he spots a recruit trying to clean a toilet bowl while standing as far away from it as possible – with his scrub-brush extended, he looks like he’s fencing. His battle is with one particularly stubborn fleck of matter stuck tight to the porcelain. The sergeant reaches in and scrapes it off with a thumbnail. To the groans around him, he rhetorically asks, “Did j’ever see a pile of [enemy troops] that got blown up and laid there for a week?”
Some of us go on to Advanced Infantry Training, AIT, and a new set of sergeants and officers.
Sergeant Kolikowski gets word from home that his brother has been murdered. He goes to the battalion armory and signs out a M1911 .45 caliber pistol. He’s gone for a week, then returns and checks the weapon back in. Nothing is said about his absence.
We are taught to use the bayonet in offense and defense, no rules, kill or be killed. We drive it into a dummy, we pivot our rifles to bring a butt stroke to a dummy chin, we thrust and parry. Sergeant Doherty doesn’t think I’m trying hard enough; he braces himself and shouts in my face, “Come on Smithee, try to kill me!” It’s hard to say why, but caught up in all the make-believe bloodshed around me,I make a genuine effort to kill him by stabbing him in the face. He’s prepared and fast enough to move out of the way, but it’s close, very close; he is surprised and calls for a smoke break.
A few days later, he tells me I’m going on a work detail with him. Several of our barracks’ light bulbs are burned out, and it’s not easy to get replacements for such things in the army. Our mission is to drive a borrowed Jeep over to a currently vacant barracks and remove its light bulbs. Despite what his name would suggest, Sergeant Doherty is black, and I think my presence is partly to inoculate him from suspicion when visiting an empty barracks. Or, maybe he just wants the company, I don’t know. We stride in looking like we are on official army business; we gather a good number of bulbs; we leave. Mission accomplished.
One day our company commander gathers 20 or so recruits into what we might today call a focus group. It is surprisingly touchy-feely, and at one point he asks if there are any problems he should know about. It’s not like me to pass up an opportunity to complain, and I raise my hand and say there are two problems I know about, a small one and a larger one. I give the trivial one first – during breakfast, the sugar dispensers run out and don’t get refilled, so the second half of the company to arrive has no sugar for their coffee. The larger problem is that we are not getting enough to eat; half the time we leave the mess hall still hungry. He asks if anybody else feels the same way; almost every hand goes up. Looking angry, he promises to look into it.
Here I’ll mention something I saw once when on KP (Kitchen Police: pot-scrubbing, potato-peeling, other grunt work), and didn’t give any thought. A civilian truck pulls up behind the mess hall and the cooks load on 8 or 10 bulk food items; a case of canned peaches is the one that sticks in my mind.
In a few days there’s plenty of food, more than plenty, the servings overload our trays. The scam that scammed too deeply has been ended. As I dump almost half a chicken into the garbage can, the mess sergeant asks me sarcastically if I’m getting enough to eat.
But first let me tell you about some other Things That Happened at the first Foodland I worked at.
L Three W-_]-omen, Fernand Léger 1921, via flickr
The three chain owners and their wives, sometimes just the wives, stop by occasionally on a Sunday to watch the money roll in. Perhaps one of the wives has read tips on “how to reach your customers” in a business magazine, for she has decided the store needs a suggestion box, and it should be where the checkout lines form.
After the box has been installed for a week, the wives are eager to learn what their customers think would make for a better Foodland. When the instigating wife opens the box, there’s not much inside, but the first thing she pulls out is a torn-out page of notebook paper on which is scrawled “THIS STORE SUCKS”. The woman has probably lived a life free of criticism or adversity, she is genuinely hurt . She worries aloud, “What’s wronggg with our stoooore? What’s wronggg with our stoooore?”, and seems ready to start a witch hunt among the employees until her husband settles her down. Shortly thereafter, the box is gone.
As bookkeeper, I’m in charge when the regular management is off. I have an arrangement with the manager of the movie house across the street. I let him place a placard for his latest movie in our store window; he gives me free movie passes. One day he talks me into loosely putting a bumper sticker for the latest movie on my car. He takes a photo so his management can know he’s on the ball, then unsticks the sticker.. The process seems demeaning, both me and to my car, and I don’t let it happen again.
One week, perhaps due to cashflow problems, the employees don’t get paychecks. Instead we get vouchers that can only be cashed in the store. This is not well-explained to the butchers, who usually cash their checks when having lunch at Marino’s bar across the street. Mr. Marino cashes the vouchers and sends them to the bank as though they were checks, and they all bounce. He comes into the store waving the dishonored vouchers; he’s in a rage, he thinks Foodland is broke and he’s just been burned for several hundred dollars. When I see what’s happened, I explain and he calms down. I tally up the vouchers and give him the cash; he is a happy man.
That part about Foodland being broke may not have been too farfetched. One day I try to call home, and discover the phone on my desk has been disconnected. When contacted by pay phone, the phone company tells me Foodland’s bill hasn’t been paid for several months. I call the main office and they say there’s been a small mix-up, and they take care of it.
There is a liquor store next door. A man who’s been loitering in front of our own store waiting for his wife to finish shopping beats her up because after she pays for the family groceries she doesn’t have enough money left over to suit him.
A few days before Thanksgiving, the store is crowded with customers I have never seen before. They look needy. Each family has a $25 or $50 check from the Salvation Army. I open a checkout lane and ring some of them up. Maybe they have just come from church; I hear “God bless you” several times. They seem so sweet and grateful to be well treated and shopping in a “nice” store for a change. If you’re able to, giving to “The Sallies” is a good way to help good people who happen to be struggling.
One spring day, two cashiers on their lunch hour decide to get some sun and perch on the top rail of the parking lot fence. Some leg is shown, and one passing car runs up the back of another. Embarrassed but still flattered, they hop off and run back inside the store.
After a couple of years as bookkeeper here, the company sends me to manage their small store in West New York while its manager takes vacation. The employees are nice; the town is working-class so most of the customers are nice too. When I walk into a barber shop to get a haircut, the owner is jumpy; he thinks the stranger in his chair wearing a white shirt and tie might be a cop. As we talk, I mention why I’m in town and he relaxes. Men enter the shop, speak briefly and leave; my barber is the local bookmaker.
After my stint n West New York ends without disaster, the company sends me to be assistant manager of what I’ll call Foodland II. It’s in Elizabeth, the same town as the first Foodland, but is newer and much bigger.
The manager of Foodland II, Gabe, is old for the supermarket business; he wears nubby sweaters and looks like a turtle. He has a scam as old as cash registers: he unlocks the front door to admit occasional early shoppers who arrive before any cashiers do, then tallies their purchases old-style, #2 pencil on a brown paper bag, making change out of his own pocket. I think he knows I’m on to him.
On Friday nights the store stays open until ten o’clock. I can’t leave until the store closes, and the store can’t close until all the carts are collected from the parking lot. During the evening, Gabe has the clerks doing things that could be held over until the next day. I suggest that perhaps some of them could be rounding up carts instead, so we’re not here all night. He says “No, we bring in the carts after the store closes.” I say “That’s stupid, it doesn’t make any sense.” After a bit more back-and-forth, he fires me. He probably engineered the confrontation because I’m on to his early-shopper scam, but I’m not terribly upset; I’m tired of supermarket work. Maybe it’s time to try something new.
I can’t remember where I was working at the time, but I remember a discussion with a co-worker whose wife had just had their first baby, and him saying, “I want my son to have a job with a chair.”
Here’s part of my own strange path to a job with a chair.
Studying the market, 1960s
When I was driving for Dugan’s Bakery, I got interested in the stock market. I studied the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Magazine, and bought a couple of stocks, Clorox and Reynolds Tobacco. They went down instead of up, so I tried to figure out where I went wrong, and became interested in technical analysis, a way to predict where a stock price is headed based on how it’s behaved in the past. Mostly it works, but sometimes it doesn’t – it’s more of an art than a science. I kept daily charts on about 20 stocks.
Above, a modern stock chart and analysis, courtesy xm.com
If I finished my route early, I sometimes stopped in at the Nugent & Igoe brokerage in East Orange, where my broker was Walter ‘Tiny Hands’ Wojcik. If you ever went by and saw a bakery truck parked around the corner, that was probably me. There were eight or ten regulars who hung around watching the electronic ticker tape crawl along one wall, and, when inspiration struck, speed-walking over to their broker’s desk to make a trade. The room was not unlike an OTB horse parlor, and the tone of the conversation was similar. Maybe that’s another article one day.
Collecting unemployment
After Dugan’s was sold down the river in 1966, I collected unemployment for a few months while applying for stockbroker jobs in New York City. Meanwhile, I subscribed to a weekly chart service and continued to make small trades and read all the financial stuff I could get my hands on.
I learned one thing about unemployment that I’ll pass along: if you show up for your weekly appointment wearing a suit and tie, they’re not going to hassle you too much. So, Mr. Smithee, you want to be a stockbroker but have only the most remote of qualifications? Here’s your check, and good luck with next week’s search. After many weeks they got sick of seeing me, and put me with a group of others who hadn’t found jobs, to take a manual-dexterity test with a view toward getting us assembly line jobs somewhere. That’s another article some day, too.
iBM 403 accounting machine plugboard, courtesy Ken Sherriff, righto.com
At the Nugent & Igoe office, I was friends with a young guy named Jerry, who would look over my shoulder at my charts. He said if you like doing stuff like that, you should get into computers. There was a programming and control-board-wiring school directly across the street, and I paid them a visit. Programming school was not in session, but they showed me their accounting machines and the control boards, and I fell in love with the boards’ combination of complexity and orderliness. I filed Jerry’s career suggestion in the back of my mind.
Mayflower Securities
A while after Dugan’s went out of business, I got a call from Tommy MacMillan, a former supervisor who knew I was interested in the stock market. He suggested I might like working for Mayflower Securities. At the time, Mayflower was on the level; I know that because I asked my bank to get me a Standard & Poor’s company report on them.
My eventual manager Skip Zarra had no interest in the finer points of the stock market or investing; his only interest was in making sales. During my interview, he asked who in the world of finance I most admired, but didn’t recognize the name Jesse Livermore, a famous day trader, and on and off one of the richest people in the world. That’s not exactly a black mark on Skip, but it tells you something.
Mayflower and other securities firms sent their prospective brokers, aka “registered representatives”, to an intensive three-weekend securities course held in a classroom in the instructor’s home in Union. As I recall, we had to pay for the course ourselves; fair enough, I suppose. The object was to pass the SEC Series 7 Examination to get our brokers licenses. I’ll let the SEC explain it:
“Individuals who want to enter the securities industry to sell any type of securities must take the Series 7 examination—formally known as the General Securities Representative Examination. Individuals who pass the Series 7 examination are eligible to register to trade all securities products, including corporate securities, municipal fund securities, options, direct participation programs, investment company products, and variable contracts.”
Next we took the examination, which was multiple-choice. I’ve always been a good test-taker, and I passed.
A company dinner
Mayflower gave a Christmas dinner for their sales people and spouses. I’m not sure if there were any female sales people at the time, but there might have been. It was at a fancy restaurant, and the sky was the limit. Mimi and I were seated with Skip and Tommy and their wives, and there was good conversation all around. No introductions were offered beyond an informal “Hi, I’m…”.
After the meal Gene Mulvihill, founder and owner of the company, got up to give a motivational speech. During the speech, Skip leaned over and whispered to me “His wife owns thirty percent of the company”. I whispered back “Yes, I know” and he seemed surprised. During a lull in the conversation later, he asked how I knew about Gene’s wife’s partial ownership, and I said it was in the company’s S&P report. He next asked how I had come to see an S&P report on the company, and I said I had asked my bank to pull one for me. This did not go over well, and he said “You pulled an S&P report on us? YOU pulled an S&P on US?”, as though the world had turned upside down.
A couple of weeks later, I phoned Tommy’s house with a procedural question and his wife answered, She said he wasn’t home, and asked if she could take a message. I said “Yes, this is Paul Smithee”, and when she didn’t respond, added “We met at the Christmas party.” After a second, she said “Oh, at the Christmas party, right.” The next day, Tommy phoned to ask what my question was, and also said “That wasn’t my wife at the party.” I apologized profusely, but he said it was his own fault for not properly introducing his friend. When I passed this news along to Mimi, she was not surprised, and said “I thought there was something funny going on with them.” Hey, thanks for telling me.
Tweed.
Early on, I went to Brooks Brothers and invested in an expensive three-piece British tweed suit and a good tweed overcoat. I wore them to every job interview and important meeting I had for years afterward. I also bought a new car, a ‘67 Valiant, partly to impress clients that I had a new car, and partly because I needed one. That car lasted a long time, almost as long as the suit, which eventually no longer fit.
Making sales After we were SEC-licensed registered representatives, we were trained to go to commercial areas such as strip malls and ask small-business owners “Has anyone ever talked to you about mutual funds?” Mutual funds were just then coming into their own and getting a lot of positive press coverage. We sold monthly investment plans in Oppenheimer and Dreyfus funds, nothing shady about either one, both are still around today. The SEC required we make potential clients aware that half their first year’s investment went toward sales commissions, so it would be important that they continue the plan and not cash out early. Some salesmen conveniently forgot to mention that point, but I never did.
I sold an Oppenheimer monthly plan to my upstairs neighbors; they needed to cash it in the next year and took a big hit, and I felt bad. I also sold an Oppenheimer monthly plan to a restaurant owner who I happened to catch during the afternoon lull. When I went to his home to pick up his shares of AT&T to sell to pay for the Oppenheimer, his family was very suspicious of me and the whole deal, but over the years he got a much better return with Oppenheimer.
As a kid trying to sell newspaper subscriptions, I realized right away I was no salesman. Looking back, I was too ready to accept the prospect’s first “no” and move on, instead of trying to counterpunch and wear down their resistance. Mayflower encouraged us to talk to 30 people every day, and I bought a pocket clicker to keep track. Hairdressers always seemed to have time to talk, but they never bought anything. One day working my way through a strip mall, I spotted a city worker hand-digging a hole for a traffic sign. I walked over and said “Excuse me, but has anyone ever talked to you about mutual funds?” He looked up and said “No entiendo.” Even as I clicked my clicker to count the contact, I knew I was just kidding myself.
Shady doings
I finally quit Mayflower when they changed their philosophy and wanted us to start pushing penny stocks they bought by the bushel, instead of standard, legitimate mutual funds.
Mayflower was later absorbed by the infamous “pump and dump” penny-stock outfit First Jersey Securities. First Jersey was headed by Robert Brennan, later described by Forbes as “a swindler of a recognizable type: totally unscrupulous, with the nerve and audacity of a second-story man”. In 2001, Brennan was found guilty of money laundering and bankruptcy fraud, and sentenced to nine years in prison.
After looking into other schools, I used the GI Bill to register for a computer programming course at Automation Institute, and an old friend gave me a lead on a night warehouse job I could work at while I attended school during the day. I was on my way.
Our oldest sergeant is a grizzled Korean War vet. Overseeing our cleaning of the latrine, he spots a recruit trying to clean a toilet bowl while standing as far away from it as possible – with his scrub-brush extended, he looks like he’s fencing. His battle is with one particularly stubborn fleck of matter stuck tight to the porcelain. The sergeant reaches in and scrapes it off with a thumbnail. To the groans around him, he rhetorically asks, “Did j’ever see a pile of [enemy troops] that got blown up and laid there for a week?”
stroke to a dummy chin, we thrust and parry. Sergeant Doherty doesn’t think I’m trying hard enough; he braces himself and shouts in my face, “Come on Smithee, try to kill me!” It’s hard to say why, but caught up in all the make-believe bloodshed around me,I make a genuine effort to kill him by stabbing him in the face. He’s prepared and fast enough to move out of the way, but it’s close, very close; he is surprised and calls for a smoke break.
In a few days there’s plenty of food, more than plenty, the servings overload our trays. The scam that scammed too deeply has been ended. As I dump almost half a chicken into the garbage can, the mess sergeant asks me sarcastically if I’m getting enough to eat.
