“I asked my old friend to give me his name and
told him that I would send him my address to Butte
so he would be sure to get it; that he might
lose it if he put it in his pocket.
“He told me his name. I gave him a note
to the superintendent at Pocatello, asking him to
pass the old Frenchman to Butte. We talked until
my train started. Every few sentences, the old
man would say: ‘Que Dieu vous benisse,
mon enfant!’ (May God bless you, my boy!)
“As I stood on the back end of my train, pulling
away from the station, the old man looked at me saying:
“‘Adieu! Adieu!’ Then, looking
up into the sky, he made a sign of the cross and said:
‘Que Dieu vous protege, mon enfant!’
(May God protect you, my boy!)
“That blessing was worth a copper mine.”
HOW TO GET ON THE ROAD.
Since starting on the road many have asked me:
“How can I get a job on the road?”
Young men and old men have asked me this—clerks,
stock boys, merchants and students. Even wives
have asked me how to find places for their husbands.
Let’s clear the ground of dead timber.
Old men of any sort and young men who haven’t
fire in their eyes and ginger in their feet need not
apply. The “Old Man,” who sits in
the head office sizes up the man who wishes to go
out on the road and spend a whole lot of the firm’s
money for traveling expenses with a great deal more
care than the dean of a college measures the youth
who comes to enter school. The dean thinks:
“Well, maybe we can make something out of this
boy, dull as he is. We’ll try.”
But the business man says: “That fellow
is no good. He can’t sell goods. What’s
the use of wasting money on him and covering a valuable
territory with a dummy?”
On the other hand, the heads of wholesale houses are
ever on the watch for bright young men. This
is no stale preachment, but a live fact! There
are hundreds of road positions open in every city in
America. Almost any large firm would put on ten
first class men to-morrow, but they can’t
find the men.
The “stock” is the best training school
for the road—the stock boy is the drummer
student. Once in a while an old merchant, tiring
of the routine of the retail business, may get a “commission
job”—that is, he may find a position
to travel for some firm, usually a “snide outfit”—if
he will agree to pay his own traveling expenses and
accept for his salary a percentage of his sales shipped.
Beware, my friend, of the “commission job!”
Reliable firms seldom care to put out a man who does
not “look good enough” to justify them
in at least guaranteeing him a salary he can live
on. They know that if a man feels he is going
to live and not lag behind, he will work better.
The commission salesman is afraid to spend his own
money; yet, were he to have the firm’s money
to spend, many a man who fails would succeed.
Once in a while a retail clerk may get a place on the
road, but the “Old Man” does not look
on the clerk with favor. The clerk has had things
come his way too easy. His customers come to him;
the man on the road must go after his customers.
It is the stock boy who has the best show to get on
the road.
