Door-to-door Part Two

Come to think of it, my family had door-to-door experience on both sides, the knocker and the knockee.

In 1960, my mother took on temporary employment as a census taker. Basically a stay-at-home mom, this was the perfect job for her, as she got to stalk around the neighborhood knocking on people’s doors and asking how many people there were hanging from the rafters. This was back in the day when the rafters were pretty empty (illegal immigrants were barely a glint in Arizona’s eye) so there wasn’t much to it, but the Constitution demanded it and it earned her a little extra spending money, so it seemed like the good deal. The problem was, not everyone was there when you knocked on the door, which meant going back. Therein lay the rub. My mother, who is about as extroverted and people-oriented as a squid, could get through the first level in the daylight, but going back, usually at night (even then she was fairly anti-nocturnal, a trait that grew in proportion over the years as her vision deteriorated and she began comparing night driving to a Mars landing), was beyond the pale, Constitution or no Constitution. This forced my father into the fray, he being the opposite of the squid personality, a friendlier and more outgoing fish by far. The two of them would go out, and eventually all the doors got knocked on, and the Constitution was upheld.

Whew.

My own door-to-doorness was, first, the regular business every year of selling chances on a turkey, our annual grammar school fundraiser. I imagine it was every grammar school’s annual fundraiser. You could buy a raffle ticket for a quarter, five for a dollar. Given the price of turkeys nowadays, which isn’t all that steep, unless there’s been an amazing population explosion of gobblers since my youth this wasn’t all that great an investment. Worse, all the kids in school would get their raffle books at the same time, and each of us would stop at every house on our way home that first day (we had no school buses back then, being forced like everyone at the time to walk five miles uphill in the snow in both directions) to sell the stay-at-homes chances on a turkey. This was a mug’s game, because once the first kid got in, the rest of us were shut out. And I’d bet anything the locals got advance word from the school that the tickets were coming, and most of the time when you knocked on the door there was no response whatever, except perhaps the tiniest movement of a curtain on the second floor as the natives hid in fear and trembling. (This is much the same way door-to-door censuses are today, where the natives aren’t exactly natives, but that’s a different story.)

Needless to say, the most chances were sold by parents who took the books to their jobs and shamed their coworkers into buying them. The same holds true today with Girl Scout cookies, which has built an entire entrepreneurial empire of children based on the fact that the children aren’t entrepreneurs, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. For me, the sad thing was that my father’s office was small, and the number of people he could shame into buying chances on a turkey that they didn’t want was pretty small, which means that I never won a prize for selling the most chances. And yes, there was a prize; this being a Catholic school, there was always a reward for good works, although the prize was probably a missal or a collection of holy pictures or something, I can’t remember exactly what, having never partook. Childhood for me was, alas, cruel.


On the other hand, I did luck into a gig at some point collecting back subscription fees for the Catholic News. People would subscribe to the paper, but stop paying for it, but the Pope kept sending them weekly issues anyhow. Then kids like me, dusty-faced urchins looking like poor starving orphans (which actually wasn’t me, but go with me here), would appear at your door with an Oliver Twist plea for paying the back funds. I was paid a share of the proceeds, plus some people tipped, although why they tipped me I can’t say, given that I didn’t deliver the paper, just the arrears. Guilt, I guess. I mean, it was the Catholic News; what was wrong with these people, stealing it from the Vatican in the first place? This proved to be a lucrative but sadly isolated venture in my career. I had a sheet of names and addresses and amounts owed (some of them going back for years), and over the space of a couple of weekends I cleared it as many names as possible (except for the lurkers behind the second-floor curtains), and made the most money I had ever made so far in my young life. I learned a great lesson from that, namely, that if you’re in the right place at the right time you can get a quick gig and make a few bucks and never look back. It’s the right place and the right time that are key.
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