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Who's that knocking at my door?
(by Ed Flynn - May 28, 2008)
The other evening when my wife and I had settled down in our favorite chairs in the family room to watch the evening news we heard the somewhat surprising sound of the front door chimes.
People seldom come to our front door these days, you see. Family members generally come through the garage and use the door to our laundry room which we seldom lock. Oh, we do get the occasional visit from a Jehovah’s Witness or from some civic minded citizen seeking signatures on a petition – heaven only knows what causes I’ve agreed to support – or even a Girl Scout selling cookies, but such calls are rare enough that the musical summons to the front door is always kind of startling, like a phone call in the middle of the night.
Since it’s obviously a man’s job to respond to the call – after all, who knows who could be there? – I went and opened the door rather cautiously and standing there on our front stoop was a member of an endangered species, one of the few remaining door-to-door salesmen. In this case he was a neatly dressed young man and he had parked a panel truck in our driveway with a clearly readable logo on the side that helped to establish his credentials. He explained that he represented a company that sold food supplies direct to people’s home for their freezers, and when I told him that we were an elderly couple who ate very little he seemed to understand, thanked me politely and went back to his truck.
As I watched him drive over to the next house I actually felt a bit sad. He seemed like a nice young man, and it must be hard to be a door-to-to door salesmen these days, particularly when the news is full of warnings about unscrupulous con artists who show up at your front door. I sort of wished I could have bought something from him, maybe a couple of pounds of frozen hamburger, but that would have been silly because the freezer in our refrigerator is already filled with leftovers we never eat.
There was a time, of course, before and for several decades after World War II, when the door-to-door salesman was commonplace. As late as the 1950s, in fact, two percent of the American work force listed their profession as door-to-door salesperson.
Possibly the most famous was “The Fuller Brush
Man. ” Another familiar door-to-door pitchman was the
Eureka vacuum cleaner representative who would demonstrate his product’s capability on your own carpet. And there was hardly a home in that wasn’t visited by a salesman for the Encyclopedia Britannica or by the
Avon lady.
Come to think of it, maybe the reason I felt sorry for the frozen food salesman at my front door the other evening was because I had once been a door-to-door salesman myself. Well sort of. It was back around 1939 during one summer vacation when I was still in high school and I had a job helping out the driver of a Dugan’s Bakery truck. In those days Dugan’s was well known in northern
New Jersey and its trucks delivered bread and other baked goods right to the doorstep of homes. Every home along the route was provided with a cardboard letter “D” that the housewife could put in her front window if she wanted a loaf of bread that morning and the driver covered his route twice; early in the morning to drop of the loaf of bread wherever that “D” was displayed and a second time to try and sell something extra like a coffee cake or cinnamon coated donuts.
My job that summer was basically to run back and forth from the truck with the loaves of bread while the truck moved slowly along the street. However, as the summer progressed, the driver realized that a young, freckled faced boy with an unruly blond cowlick was a more irresistible salesman than he was and he’d send me up on that second time around to ring the front door bell with instructions to hold out a box of marshmallow filled cup cakes or maybe an apple pie and say, “I thought maybe you’d like these, ma’am.”
It seemed to work. But I doubt if I’d be much of a success as a door-to-door salesman these days. For one thing I’ve lost both those freckles and my hair. Or is that two things?
Besides, in this age of telemarketing, opportunities for door-to-door salesmen are pretty limited. Dugan’s went out of business in the 1960s, you can get an entire set of encyclopedia Britannica on a single computer disk and order your Fuller brushes on-line. Pretty soon, I assume, the only place you’re going to find a door-to-door salesman is as a stuffed replica in a museum standing alongside the milkman and the doctor who made house calls and other symbols of a bygone
.
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