🎧 300: In the days that ...

IN THE DAYS that followed, Herb looked for work, and Lorna looked for a place to live. As it happened, Lorna found a job, and Herb found an apartment.
     The job that Lorna found, through a conversation with a woman in a drug store, was a job for Herb. It wasn’t much of a job. It was a job as a culler in the Babbington Clam packing plant. Cullers picked through the clams, sorting them by size and quality. Cullers’ work was boring work. It didn’t pay much. The woman who suggested it to Lorna was a clammy’s wife; she had thought of culling as work for Lorna, work to bring in money until her husband got a job, work that would assure her that some money would always be coming in, even when her husband was out of work, work to help make ends meet, work to earn her some mad money, perhaps, but not a breadwinner’s work, not work for bringing home the bacon.
     Herb took the job at once. He and Lorna didn’t need money right away; they had put together enough to keep them for a while. Herb knew, though, from his selling experience, how important, persistent, and difficult to alter a first impression is, and for that reason he wanted to get to work right away, and the meaner the job, the more it suited him. The first impression that people have of you, even when it is a mistaken one (and I’d be willing to bet that three first impressions out of four are mistaken), becomes a part of your past as perceived (or misperceived) by those who have formed the impression (or misimpression), a part of that past that pursues you forever, that dogged giant who’s always on your heels. Bob Mintner, in his overpriced videocassette series You Could Make a Million If You Would Stop Acting Like a Jerk, says, on the subject of the first impression:

     You can NEVER overcome the first impression. If you get off on the WRONG FOOT, you can NEVER get back in step. You may think that tomorrow, if you wear a new jacket and tie, change your hairstyle, sprinkle your remarks with some of the latest “SNAPPY” expressions, and put a new SPRING in your step, people will see you in a NEW LIGHT, that they’ll say, “Say, I’ve been ALL WRONG about Fred! Why, it’s as if I’m seeing him for the FIRST TIME.” Well, FORGET it. You’re WRONG. They may look at you, but they won’t SEE you. The man they are going to see is the man who matches the IDEA THEY FORMED OF YOU when they FIRST MET YOU. Compared to you, that guy is a GIANT! The only thing you can do if you’ve gotten off on the wrong foot is pack your bags, get out of town, change your name, and start ALL OVER AGAIN.

     “What I want to do, Lorna,” said Herb, “is make a good first impression. I want to impress on people the idea that I’m ready to work. I want them to think of me as a hard and willing worker. Later on, I can find a good selling job, I’m sure of that. When I do, I’ll have a reputation around town. People won’t think of me as a guy who came into town as a salesman. They’ll think of me as a guy who came to Babbington with nothing but ambition and a willingness to work and who, by God, worked himself up from a job culling in the clam plant to a good job as a salesman. I’ll be a Babbington success story, a local hero, and people will be happy to buy from me.”
     Lorna wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not. She saw that there was wisdom behind Herb’s idea, but even so it sounded like a laughable scheme. “Where did you get those ideas?” she asked.
     “Well,” said Herb, “I thought of the details myself, but I got the basic idea from one of the books in Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf.”
     “What one was that?”
     “Sixty-six Steps up the Stairway to Success — Starting at the Bottom.”

In Topical Guide 300, Mark Dorset considers Literature: Self-Improvement and Self-Help from this episode.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

• You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

• You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

• You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

• At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.

• You’ll find overviews of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.