As for fuzzy shoes, that’s simple. Women wear fuzzy shoes to keep their feet warm. Women’s feet are always cold. It’s a simple fact of nature, or a quirk of anatomy. Women’s feet are always cold, their bladders are the size of a White Acre pea, and they can hear whispers at three hundred paces if they figure the whisper involves another woman or a piece of gossip. (And, yes, I realize this entire parenthetical exercise is overtly sexist in nature. Recall, however, the time frame in which I am currently writing is 1964, before sexism was invented by a group of women wearing hair curlers and receiving some liberal talk-show blather from public radio.)
I started my sales pitch. The woman interrupted me and said, with an accompanying snarl, “I don’t care who you are and what you’re selling!”
The force of the door slamming to in my face must have jolted Richter scales. There is nothing quite as belittling, I was beginning to understand, as a door being slammed in your face. It said volumes, which could be condensed down to such few words as: “Get the hell away from me, you creep.”
I lasted in the exciting field of sales until eleven that morning. I didn’t sell a single set of encyclopedias. I was allowed in only two houses.
In one, a small poodle dog kept yapping throughout my entire sales pitch. When I finally had finished giving it, the would-be customer, a lady in her sixties, said, “Sorry, but Mr. Binghampton and I don’t read very much.”
At the second house, before I even introduced myself and stated my purpose, a lady said, “Come on in, the set’s in the den.”
She thought I was the television repairman she had called. Do television repairman wear ties on house calls? I wondered. When I told the woman I wasn’t the television repairman but a salesman of encyclopedias, she said, “I don’t want any encyclopedias. I want my television fixed. Do you know anything about televisions?”
I said that I didn’t.
She showed me the door.
I walked out of the subdivision and found a bus stop. When the bus came, I left my sales kit on the sidewalk, got on the bus, and retired.
I would often wonder later what ever became of Howard Barnes.
Many years later, there would appear on television sets across the country a left-handed guitar player/singer/yodeler named Slim Whitman. He would have a pencil-thin mustache and would appear somewhat shiftless. All I’m saying is if Slim Whitman doesn’t look like an ex-used car/encyclopedia salesman, a 1957 Plymouth will start on the first try on a cold morning in February.
The morning after my early retirement from sales, jobless again, I drove back to downtown Atlanta, parked at Union Station again, and got into banking in a matter of hours. I headed down Marietta Street and came to the First National Bank. Why not? I walked inside and located the personnel department.
“I’m Lewis Grizzard,” I said, leaving out the part about my future in journalism, “and I was wondering if you have any job openings.”
A woman, pleasant for a change, handed me an application. I filled it out, gave it back to her, and then she said, “I must ask you to take our standard test.”
Test? That concerned me. What sort of test would I have to take? A test about banking? All I really knew about banking was, the pens were always missing when you went into a bank to cash a check or fill out a deposit slip.
Although most banks went to the trouble of attaching their pens to their desks with little chains, the pens still were always missing, which concerned me greatly. How can an institution be trusted to watch over my money when it couldn’t even keep people from stealing its pens in broad daylight?
The woman handed me the test and directed me to a small room. Inside the room was one chair and one desk.
“Complete the test and bring it back to me,” said the woman.
I went into the room and sat down in the chair. Then I realized I didn’t have a pen. There wasn’t one on the desk, either. I was certain someone had stolen it.
I walked back outside and asked the woman, “Do you have a pen?”
“I’ve got one here somewhere,” she said, beginning a search of the top of her desk. Failing there, she began to pull out desk drawers. She didn’t find a pen there, either. Finally, she went to her purse. No pen.
“Let me ask Mr. Gleegenhammer, the personnel director, if he has one,” she said.
A few minutes later, the woman returned with a pen.
“It’s the only one Mr. Gleegenhammer has,” she informed me. “Be certain to return it when you’re finished with your test.”
I thought to myself, If I really wanted to make a lot of money in my life, what I would do is sell pens to banks.
Instantly recalling my previous experience in the exciting field of sales, however, I took the pen and went to work on the test.
It was a pretty easy test. On the left side of the test, I found a number. Let’s say the number was 314. On the right, I found five numbers. Let’s say they were, 11, 478, 6, 925, 314, and 9. The idea was to circle the number in the right series of numbers that was the same as the one on the left.
My test score was perfect. Why had I wasted my time studying algebra? I could have aced the test with the mathematical knowledge I received playing with my counting blocks when I was four.
“You did quite well on your test,” the woman said. (You mean people come in here who don’t?)
“Give me my pen back,” said Mr. Gleegenhammer as soon as I had sat down in the chair in front of his desk. The next thing he said was, “We currently have an opening in our loan-payment department. It pays sixty dollars a week.”
“Hmm,” I said to myself. “Banking apparently doesn’t pay as well as the exciting field of sales.” But banking also didn’t involve hoofing it around some neighborhood getting doors slammed in your face.
“I’ll take it,” I told Mr. Gleegenhammer.
“Fine,” he replied, “Report to the loan-payment department in the morning at eight and see Mr. Killingsworth.”
I thought about asking, “What will I be doing in the loan-payment department?” but it wouldn’t have mattered. It was obviously inside work with no heavy lifting involved, and if that idiot test was an example of the mental prowess it would take to work in the loanpayment department, I figured by eight-thirty the next morning I’d be able to perform any task put before me. I might even make vice president. Mr. Gleegenhammer hadn’t asked if I had wanted temporary or permanent employment, so I hadn’t volunteered such information. A couple of weeks before classes started at Georgia, I’d simply announce I had been thinking it over, that banking just wasn’t my pot of glue, and that I had decided to go to college and study journalism. What could they do to me? Put something bad on my permanent record? Ronnie Jenkins had been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom about a thousand times, and that fact had been put on his permanent record, but Ronnie had got a job at a bank, too, so banks apparently had very little interest in permanent records.
I’ll get my duties in the loan-payment department over in a hurry: Customers who borrowed money from the First National Bank of Atlanta—and I would find there were many such people—received loan-payment books, made up of computer cards.
You know these cards. Do not fold, staple, or mutilate these cards. There is a reason the bank doesn’t want you to do that. I’ll get to why later.
Each loan-payment card had the amount of the monthly installment printed on it. The idea was for