My wife became ill carrying our 6th child, and so I left the circus in mid-season to come home to care for her.
But I still needed a job to keep us going. We had just bought a house on Como Avenue, across from Van Cleve Park. There was a big cottonwood in the back yard and squirrels rioted in the attic. That house had real character and I didn't want to lose it.
Happily, just a few blocks away on Hennepin, the Fingerhut Catalogue company had established a telemarketing office. They were desperately trying to find enough warm bodies to fill 120 seats.
So I became a telemarketer. Don't expect me to apologize or start agonizing about the job. It paid well when I went above my weekly sales goals, and I got health insurance -- which was a godsend because that was the year all the kids came down with ear infections and bronchitis.
I enjoyed walking to work each day, past old brick homes with their mansard roofs and weedy gardens full of flaming pumpkins and ruined birdbaths. A lot of those homes were still in the hands of retired blue collar workers from the Pillsbury Mills on the river and machinists from the Ford plant over in St Paul. Their houses were worth a fortune but they hadn't the means to get them fixed up properly, so they sat in their gentle decay like something out of a Southern Gothic novel.
And I prospered at work, becoming an assistant supervisor after only six weeks on the job.
My boss was Jeff -- a man with no neck and the disposition of an alligator.
My job now was to track the sales of each telemarketer. If they fell below certain well-defined weekly sales goals they were given one warning. Only one. If it happened again it was my job to let them go. That particular part of the job added immeasurably to my vocabulary, after hearing so many colorful descriptions of myself and of Fingerhut from those I gave the old heave-ho to.
That was the year that Fingerhut teamed up with The Swiss Colony to start selling their salami and cheese gift packages over the phone for the Holidays.
If you live in the Upper Midwest you have gotten at least one gift package from The Swiss Colony. They are as ubiquitous as casseroles. Those little pots of mustard; the petit fours; the useless tin cheese knife and plywood cheese board -- it is the stuff that Christmas is made of for the mundane masses from Sioux Falls to Sioux Ste Marie.
And Fingerhut had two million Swiss Colony boxes to sell by phone between October 31 and December 19.
And those gift boxes did sell, like . . . well, like greasy salami and waxy cheddar always sell in a heavily undiscerning Scandinavian and German part of the country. Fantastic.
Our top telemarketer was Shirley. She had been with the company for ages. Her sales statistics were fabulous. Because she cut the sales pitch right to the bone. It never varied:
"Hello this is Shirley I'm from Fingerhut how are you today? We're offering Swiss Colony gift boxes with cheese meat and jelly for only 19-95-plus shipping and handling. How many would you like?"
Ninety percent of the people she contacted said no. But boy oh boy, that ten percent that said yes made her bonus money up the wazoo.
And she needed the funds. She was a single mother who supported not only her own children but her elderly mother and a host of useless brothers that, she told me once, had put Hamm's Brewery on the map.
Two weeks before Christmas Jeff called me into his sterile white office, which reminded me of an operating room for extra-terrestial probing, to tell me that Shirley was making too much money off of the company and needed to be encouraged to leave.
"
She's paid nearly as much as you are" he told me, as if that should cause me to collapse in a dead faint.
I was given my marching orders: She had a performance review coming up that week, and I was to make it a hatchet job; to find fault with everything about her work, her appearance, and her attitude. And to make sure she did not merit another raise!
I did as I was told. I told her she spent too much time in the bathroom; her hair looked unprofessional; her voice was too loud; she was not customer-focused. So it had been decided not to give her a raise this quarter.
She wept and she raged at me. But she stuck it out until New Years, and then walked out the door for the last time with one of the fattest sales bonus checks in the history of Fingerhut . . .
After bambina # 6 was born that spring, with both mother and child as healthy as a pair of horses, I felt the old restless urge to be out under canvas again, taking pratfalls and selling coloring books. Plus having to do the dirty to Shirley had left a bad taste in my mouth. If that was what management was all about I'd rather risk a blow down from a tornado in Kearney, Nebraska.
So when Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus called from Florida with an offer, I packed my trunk, kissed the wife and kids goodbye, and got on the Greyhound Bus . . .
