1959

1959

At age 8 I started my second business. After shinning everyone’s shoes in the neighborhood that wanted that service I sort of ran out of customers. One day my next door neighbor threw away a bunch of costume earrings in the trash outside. In those days we would make trash piles of things that didn’t go in the garbage cans and pile them outside on the curb for collections. This was a great source of treasure hunting for myself and my two brothers Gary and Craig. Anyway, I collected all the earrings, tacked them onto cardboard in a nice display and went door to door selling them. Ten cents each, or three for a quarter.

I remember to this day what happened when I went to one home where a little girl my age lived. I knocked on the door and she answered and I did my pitch and she screamed very loudly, “Oh my God – Linda, Linda come here, come here quickly” calling to her older sister. I was frozen in terror – what had I done? Did I scare her? Did she think I was going to hurt her or rob their house? Why was she calling out to her older sister for help? I was really confused and concerned at that moment. When Linda the older sister came to the door and said what is it? The little girl exclaimed in a loud excited voice – “Look how beautiful these earrings are, we have to buy them all – and their only 25 cents for three of them”. Relieved and full of joy, I began to breathe again as I went from panic to elation that I not only had a big sale coming up, but I also made this little girl very happy and excited as was her older sister when she saw the earrings. They bought almost all the earrings and I was hooked on selling. That was the moment that marketing and being a marketer sunk into the very fabric of my being as a fun, rewarding and joyful thing to do.


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