自考英语综合二下册课文 lesson 12
Lesson Twelve
Text Selling the Post
(II) Russell Baker
We lived in Belleville New Jersey,
a commuter town at the northern fringe of Newark.
It was 1932,the bleakest year of the Depression.
My father had died two years before,
leaving us with a few pieces of Sears,Roebuck furniture and not much more,
and my mother had taken my sister, Doris,
and me to live with one of her younger brothers.
This was my Uncle Allen.
Uncle Allen had made something of himself by 1932.
As salesman for a soft-drink bottler,
he had an income of $30 a week;
wore pearl-gray spats,detachable collars,
and a three-piece suit was happily married;
and took in threadbare relatives.
With my toad of magazines I headed toward Belleville Avenue.
That's where the people were.
There were two filling stations at the intersection with Union Avenue,
as well as an A&P,a street fruit stall,a bakery,
a barber shop,a drugstore,and a diner shaped like a railroad car.
For several hours I made myself highly visible,
shifting position now and then from corner to corner,
from shop window to shop window,
to make sure everyone could see the heavy black lettering on the bag
that said the Saturday Evening Post.
When the angle of the light indicated it was suppertime,
I walked back to the house.
"How many did you sell. Buddy?" my mother asked.
"None.""Where did you go?"
"The corner of Belleville and Union Avenues. "
"What did you do?"
"Stood on the corner waiting for somebody to buy a Saturday Evening Post."
"You just stood there?"
"Didn't sell a single one. "
"For God's sake,Russell!"Uncle Allen intervened.
"I've been thinking about it for some time," he said,
"and I've about decided to take the Post regularly.
Put me down as a regular customer.
"I handed him a magazine and he paid me a nickel.
It was the first nickel I earned.
Afterwards my mother instructed me in salesmanship.
I would have to ring doorbells,address adults with charming self-confidence,
and break down resistance with a sales talk pointing out that no one,
no matter how poor,
could afford to be without the Saturday Evening Post in the home.
I told my mother I'd changed my mind
about wanting to succeed in the magazine business.
"If you think I'm going to raise a good-for-nothing," she replied,
"you've got another think coming."
She told me to hit the streets with the canvas bag and start ringing doorbells
the instant school was out the next day.
When I objected that I didn't feel any aptitude for salesman-ship,
she asked how I'd like to lend her my leather belt
so she could whack some sense into me.
I bowed to superior will and entered journalism with a heavy heart.
My mother and I had fought this battle almost as long as I could remember.
It probably started even before memory began,
when I was a country child in northern Virginia
and my mother,dissatisfied with my father's plain workman's life,
determined that I would not grow up like him and his people,
with calluses on their hands, overalls on their backs,
and fourth-grade educations in their heads.
She had fancier ideas of life's possibilities.
Introducing me to the Saturday Evening Post,
she was trying to wean me as early as possible from my father's world
where men left with their lunch pails at sunup,
worked with their hands all their lives,
and died with a few sticks of mail-order furniture as their legacy.
In my mother's vision of the better life
there were desks and white collars,well-pressed suits,
evenings of reading and lively talk,and perhaps
— if a man were very,very lucky and hit the jackpot,
really made something important of himself
—perhaps there might be a fantastic salary of $5,000 a year
to support a big house and a Buick with a rumble seat
and vacation in Atlantic City.
And so I set forth with my sack of magazines.
I was afraid of the dogs that snarled behind the doors of potential buyers,
I was timid about ringing the doorbells of strangers,
relieved when no one came to the door, and scared when someone did.
Despite my mother's instructions,
I could not deliver an engaging sales pitch.
When a door opened I simply asked,"Want to buy a Saturday Evening Post?"
In Belleville few persons did.
It was a town of 30,000 people,
and most weeks I rang a fair majority of its doorbells.
But I rarely sold my thirty copies.
Some weeks I canvassed the entire town for six days
and still had four or five unsold magazines on Monday evening;
then I dreaded the coming of Tuesday morning
when a batch of thirty fresh Saturday Evening Post was due at the front door.
One rainy night when car windows were sealed against me.
I came back soaked and with not a single sale to report.
My mother beckoned to Doris.
"Go back with Buddy and show him how to sell these magazines,"she said.
Brimming with zest,Doris,then seven years old,returned with me to the corner.
She took a magazine from the bag,
and when the light turned red she strode to the nearest car
and banged her small fist against the closed window.
The driver, probably startled to see such a little girl assaulting his car,
lowered the window to stare,
and Doris thrust a Saturday Evening Post at him.
"You need this magazine," she piped,
"and it only costs a nickel."Her salesmanship was irresistible.
Before the light changed half a dozen times she disposed of the entire batch.
I didn't feel humiliated.
I was so happy I decided to give her a treat.
Leading her to the vegetable store on Belleville Avenue,
I bought three apples,which cost a nickel,and gave her one.
"You shouldn't waste money," she said.
"Eat your apple." I bit into mine."
You shouldn't eat before supper," she said.
"It'll spoil your appetite."
Back at the house that evening,
she dutifully reported me for wasting a nickel.
Instead of a scolding,I was rewarded with a pat on the back
for having the good sense to buy fruit instead of candy.
My mother reached into her bottomless supply of maxims and told Doris,
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
"By the time I was ten I had learned all my mother's maxims by heart.
Asking to stay up past normal bedtime,
I knew that a refusal would be explained with
"Early to bed and early to rise,makes a man healthy,wealthy,and wise."
If I whimpered about having to get up early in the morning,
I could depend on her to say, "The early bird gets the worm."
The one I most despised was,
"If at first you don't succeed,try,try,try again."
This was the battle cry
with which she constantly sent me back into the hopeless struggle
whenever I moaned that I had rung every doorbell in town
and knew there wasn't a single potential buyer left in Belleville that week.
After listening to my explanation,
she handed me the canvas bag and said,
"If at first you don't succeed... "
Three years in that job,
which I would gladly have quit alter the first day except for her insistence,
produced at least one valuable result.
My mother finally concluded
that I would never make something of myself by pursuing a life in business
and started considering careers that demanded less competitive zeal.
One evening when I was eleven I brought home a short "composition"
on my summer vacation which the teacher had graded with an A.
Reading it with her own schoolteacher's eye,my mother agreed
that it was top-drawer seventh grade prose and complimented me.
Nothing more was said about it immediately,
but a new idea had taken life in her mind.
Halfway through supper she suddenly interrupted the conversation.
"Buddy," she said,
"maybe you could be a writer."I clasped the idea to my heart.
I had never met a writer,and shown no previous urge to write,
and hadn't a notion how to become a writer,
but I loved stories and thought that making up stories must surely be almost as much fun as reading them.
Best of all,though,and what really gladdened my heart,
was the ease of the writer's life.
Writers did not have to trudge through the town peddling from canvas bags,
defending themselves against angry dogs,being rejected by surly strangers.
Writers did not have to ring doorbells.
So far as I could make out,
what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.
I was enchanted.
Writers didn't have to have any gumption at all.
I did not dare tell anybody for fear of being laughed at in the schoolyard,
but secretly I decided that what I'd like to be when I grew up was a writer.
