C'mon Down to Wide Track Town

I had been married less than a week when we moved from California into our duplex out in the woods of Milton, Florida.  Here I was, a recent college graduate, ready to start my career, staring at four walls of cheap wood paneling.

Time to get a job.  I drove around town and there was slim pickin’s at the Piggly Wiggly and Miss Erma’s dress shop.  Most of the town consisted of car lots, because the new Ensigns at the nearby Navy base were young men eager to buy something their fathers didn’t have.

OK, so this was my life now?  Staring at rural route delivery mailboxes? Far different from my busy college days, where I lived in a crowded sorority with 3 and 4 to a room, where I worked at the television studio, and studied far into the night.

My sympathetic groom had a suggestion.  If Milton was full of car lots, go sell cars.  The new Ensigns would far rather buy a car from a cute chick (his words, not mine) than some old fart (also his words).  I knew nothing about selling cars.

Monday morning I drove around town looking for the biggest and nicest car lot and settled on Wayne Gowin Dodge.  I walked in and announced I wanted a job.  The salesmen told me they already had enough office help.  When I said, as a salesperson, they arched their eyebrows and had me knock on Mr. Gowin’s office door.

Just so happened that Mr. Gowin had returned the day before from a Dodge convention in New Orleans, where the largest grossing salesperson of the nation’s Dodges was a woman.  Mighty radical for 1976.  Where was he going to find a woman in Milton, Florida that wanted to sell cars?  But Monday morning I happened to come walking through his door.  He hired me on the spot.

Before he officially hired me, Charlie Pace, the sales manager, called my Navy Ensign husband in order to ask if I had permission to do this.  Hans actually had to go in and sit in front of his desk and say it was okay that I might not be home to cook his supper.

The wives of the other salesmen got worried.  What was I doing there?  The men weren’t too sure either.  They needn’t worry, I was a happy newlywed to a man as handsome as the morning.

The first day Charlie Pace announced that we were rearranging all the cars on the lot so the ones facing the street would appear new.  I think he just wanted to see if I could use a stick shift, which I could. The salesmen seemed surprised that I left their gathering place and eagerly greeted customers.  Being friendly and outgoing I was not what I worried about.  What tripped me up, and I knew it, was if they had any questions about the cars.

The dealership had never put pictures of the salesmen in the paper before, but they took our pictures and featured me as someone to see.  The town flooded in to check out this anomaly.  Mr. Gowin sent me down to Pensacola to deliver a car to a different lot, just to show off that he had something they didn’t, a female salesperson. We started getting customers down from Georgia. 

The dealership gave the salesmen a printout of past customers, saying we should write postcards to prior customers offering them deals.  The printout stretched for yards.  None of the salesmen felt like writing postcards.  Ah, ha!  Something I could do.  I was well skilled in little notes, for I’d been writing wedding thank yous for weeks.  A tsunami of customers came pouring in and I sold a few, although I still didn’t know much about cars.

I had abysmally poor sales sense. When a teenage boy and his parents came in to buy him a truck, I showed him a simple one I thought affordable. 

Charlie Pace took me aside. “No, girl. Show him the big black one with the chrome wheels. They’ll buy it for him.”

They did.  The parents told Mr. Gowin they bought the truck because no other salesperson in any of the dealerships they’d gone to paid any attention to their boy. “That girl yonder, she did.”  But Charlie Pace and I knew it was because of the chrome wheels.  Charlie slapped me on the back when that grinning boy drove out in his new black truck.

A few of my woodsier customers wanted me to go with them to the local tavern to close the deal over a beer.  I may not have sales sense, but I knew when I was being sold a line.

The other salesmen, Bob, Larry, Les and Bill, and their wives turned out to be very welcoming indeed, asking me to go to the fair, to backwoods bonfires, and over for dinner.  They were full of hospitality and generosity.

My brothers back home in California were convinced I’d moved to Florida and turned into a cigar-chomping, spitting, fact-stretching used car salesman.  I can’t claim to spit with any accuracy, or smoke cigars.  But c’mon down to wide track town and you might land in a chromed black truck.