75: I proposed the project . . .
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres,” Chapter 6 begins
6
I PROPOSED the project to Guppa the very next night, while he and Gumma and I were sitting in the living room after dinner.
Guppa was working on what he called his pigeonholes. One reason that Guppa was so phenomenally successful a Studebaker salesman was that he developed individual sales pitches to suit each potential customer. He didn’t wait for those potential customers to walk into the showroom, either; he went right out into the field after them and ran them down. In later years, I realized that Big Grandfather was disdainful of Guppa’s occupation because it was so definitely landbound, just as my father was landbound in his gas station, and I know that Big Grandfather didn’t think much of that. He would snort at the mention of anything automotive. Guppa, however, considered the hunt for Studebaker buyers every bit as exciting and demanding as the hunt for clams. If it wasn’t man pitted against nature, it was man pitted against man, and the reluctant Studebaker buyer could be a warier and more elusive prey than the wily bivalve.
To make certain that no potential buyer was overlooked, Guppa kept a card file with information about everyone in Babbington who might eventually be made, in one way or another, to become a Studebaker owner. Guppa had a lot of confidence in himself and in Studebakers. He would eliminate a person from the file only if he was convinced that there was no hope whatsoever of an eventual sale. I know, for instance, that he kept a small stack of cards with the names of the crippled and blind in the pocket of his Sunday suit, and he would take these out after communion and say a silent prayer for the cure of each.
Guppa believed that every one of the people in his active file would buy a car from him sooner or later, and that belief was the real secret of his success. It was, as he saw it, just a matter of catching the prey at the right moment or using the right lure.
Of an evening, Guppa would set himself up in the living room to do his pigeonholes. He would bring a straightback chair in from the dining room and put it in front of his comfortable chair. On the seat of the straightback chair he would prop a large, shallow, cardboard carton that had in it a number of compartments formed by interlocking cardboard dividers. This carton might have been used originally to ship apples or glassware or electrical equipment. Guppa would sit in his comfortable chair, listening to the radio, or, in later years, watching television, and pull out a batch of his cards. He’d shuffle them, turn the top card, read his notes on it, and mull the situation over. After some time, he’d come to a decision about the prospects for selling a Studebaker to the person described on the card. He’d deal the card into one of the pigeonholes in the cardboard carton. Each pigeonhole represented a strategy. They were labeled in Guppa’s wavy style of block lettering. Some of the labels made sense to me, but others made sense only to Guppa:
THE IRON IS HOT
WAIT ’N’ SEE
RATTLE SKELETON
PROD
WHEEDLE
CAJOLE
and so on. It looked like fun, this process of pigeonholing Babbingtonians. I had a small part in it. As soon as I was able to handle the cards without damaging them, Guppa would let me scramble their order for him. He liked to begin his pigeonholing afresh every month or so, yanking all the cards out of their holes, scrambling them, and reconsidering each. He would pull all the cards out of their pigeonholes and give them to me. My job was to put them into random order. Since I wasn’t nimble-fingered enough to shuffle them, I would spread them out all over the living room floor and then walk around picking the cards up in another order. I got into the habit of squatting to read the cards as I went along, and this habit has stayed with me throughout my life. Now, when I am about to do some painting and squat to begin spreading newspapers on the floor, or when I am building a fire and squat to stuff a crumpled sheet of newspaper under the kindling, something comes over me with the act of squatting, something left from the days when I used to rearrange Guppa’s cards, and I begin to read whatever article is in front of me, reading for that small but useful piece of information about a person that would have held the key to the sale of another Studebaker.
I was pleased and thrilled to discover, the first time I did this work for Guppa, that there was a card for me, with my own name lettered across the top in Guppa’s wavy block letters.
After the cards had been randomized, Guppa would spend evenings during the next month going through them and reconsidering each one. As soon as I was able to print neatly enough to satisfy Guppa, I got even more responsibility: Guppa would save the birth announcements and obituary notices from the Babbington Reporter, and I made out cards for new-born Babbingtonians and drew black borders around the cards of the deceased. Guppa didn’t discard the dead prospects’ cards, however. He used them to warm up before he got down to serious pigeonholing, pulling a card or two from the stack of black-bordered ones and thinking about what he might have done to snare the pigeon before he or she had dropped off. Now and then during these warmups, he would heave a sigh and his eyes would mist over if the sense of loss or of lost opportunity became too great.
I also copied the data from old, worn, and dirty cards onto clean new ones. This work, which I did for several years, spending some time on it whenever I visited Gumma and Guppa, gave me some familiarity with a large random sample of people in Babbington, at least with many of those who were even remotely likely to purchase a Studebaker someday.
[to be continued on Thursday, August 26, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 75, Mark Dorset considers Salesmanship; and Ego, Egoism, and Egotism from this episode.
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