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need the damn cups. My philosophy was one of helping my customer, and if I couldn’t sell him by helping him improve his own sales, I felt I wasn’t doing my job. I collected my salary of thirty-five dollars a week just the same. But my company was losing money on me by paying it, and I hated that. I vowed that I wouldn’t allow it to happen again the next winter.
    In the spring of 1925 I began to hit my stride as a salesman. There was a German restaurant called Walter Powers on the south side of Chicago. The manager was a Prussian martinet named Bittner. He always listened politely to my sales pitch, but he always, just as politely, said “Nein, danke,” and dismissed me. One day when I called on the place I saw a gleaming Marmon automobile parked at the rear entrance. I was looking it over admiringly when a man came out of the restaurant and approached me.
    â€œDo you like that car?” he asked.
    â€œYes sir!” I replied. “Say, you’re Mr. Powers, aren’t you?”
    He said he was and I told him, “Mr. Powers, if I could aspire to own a car like this, you could have the Rock Island and heaven, too.”
    We chatted for some time about automobiles. I told him that I had ridden in the rumble seat on the outside of a Stutz Bearcat, and he agreed that had to be one of life’s finer experiences. After thirty minutes or so of shooting the breeze, he asked me who I represented and I told him.
    â€œAre we giving you any business?” he asked. I shook my head and he added, “Well, you hang in there and keep trying. Herr Bittner’s a hard man, but he’s fair and square, and if you deserve it he’ll give you a chance.”
    A few weeks later, I got my first order from Bittner, and it was a substantial one. He gave me all his business after that. Other accounts were shaping up, too, and my efforts paid off in a salary increase. With this and my piano playing income, I was able to go to a Ford dealership that August and buy a brand new Model T on a Bohemian charge account—cold cash. I had been reading about the business boom down in Florida. Newspaper cartoons compared the rush down there to the gold rush of 1849, and I managed to talk Ethel into going down with me for the winter. She agreed to go if her sister, Maybelle, would come along. That was fine with me. The more the merrier, thought I.
    Needless to say, my superiors at Lily Cup were more than happy to grant me a five months leave of absence. I went around to all my customers and told them nobody would be calling on them for five months, but I promised to be back in time to stock them up for the next summer season. Ethel and I stored our furniture, cranked up the Model T, and headed south on the old Dixie Highway. It was a memorable trip. I had five new tires when we left Chicago. When we arrived in Miami, not one of those originals was left on the car. It seemed like we averaged a blowout every fifteen or twenty miles. I’d jack up the car and pull off the wheel to patch the traitorous inner tube, and sometimes while I was applying the glue or manning the air pump, another tire would go bang ! and expire. The roads were pretty primitive, of course, especially those red clay tracks through Georgia. At one point we came to a washout where the road disappeared and was replaced by a hog wallow. Ethel held the baby in her lap and steered the car while her sister and I pushed, sinking knee deep in the red muck. Our struggles were vastly entertaining to a barefoot band of ragged children who gathered to watch. When we finally got through that one, I knew nothing could stop us.
    Miami was packed to the rafters with fortune seekers like us, and we began to despair of ever finding a place to rest our weary heads. Finally, in a big old house smack in the middle of town, we found a kitchen and butler’s pantry that had been furnished with a double bed, a single bed, a table, and a set of chairs. The