I wondered if you appreciated that the successful marketing of your own product rested largely on your shoulders—yours for the planting—yours to generate enthusiasm over—yours to be posted on as no one else in the organization.
Coming home that night I was telling Mother of the lessons that the day had taught. I asked her if she thought that even you might not glean a lesson from the farmer. It was funny, Red, to hear her. I don’t know why except that to her, like all mothers, you’re still just her baby boy—either that, or else you’ve been practicing your salesmanship on her, for she thinks that you’re ’way ahead of me on the things I’ve been wondering about you. She actually believes that you could take the man that first packed food in cans and teach him something. Of course I didn’t argue with her because I never won an argument with Mother, but I just made up my mind that I’d drop you a little note and tell you that if you didn’t put the old one-two on the jaw of that problem of yours by being the best posted man on your line in the whole office, that it was going to make a serious dent in the confidence of
Your loving,
“DAD.”
P. S. The only pessimist I found on the farm, Red, was a bull-frog that croaked at night in the creek. He reminded me of a certain type of salesman—he didn’t sell anybody anything.
Dad Takes an Interest in the Boy’s Big Sales Contest
Dear Hal:
Since you have been sending me copies of all the circulars and bulletins gotten out by the General Sales department, as well as your own department, I have been kept pretty well informed as to what your firm was doing and planning to do and I don’t mind telling you that I’m as interested as a kid on December twenty-third, in this latest stunt you’re pulling—this national convention of leader salesmen campaign.
There are several inferences that I draw from the literature that’s been put out on it so far and I think I see some angles to it that may have escaped you and I figure you might be interested in just how this all looks to an innocent bystander such as myself, so I’m going to exercise my prerogative of commenting copiously, as ’twere.