Brand New Buzz

Putting a group of students together who worked at The Southwestern Company means that you will hear some of the most interesting stories. It will almost always start with the worst moment they had during their first summer selling books. Usually it is in the early summer when they had just started, after having doors slammed in their face, or not opened at all. It will usually start with a day when they were tired and uncomfortable, missing home , their families, friends and everything they know.

One of the great stories like this is by Chandler Dickey, who was selling in rural Indiana. He had had some success in the previous few weeks, but on this day he was full of despair. He had been told that it would be the hardest job he would ever get into, but that always just sort of sounds like talk, and doesn’t seem like reality until it happens. At this moment he knew it was true, and at the end of the day he sat down and composed a letter to his family to tell them what he was going through, how much he missed them, with the hopes he would hear from them soon.

In his letter he mentions that he is surprised any of them make a sale at all. It makes sense he would say this, he was selling during the Great Depression and every farmer’s crops were bad, and many people had been laid off their jobs. It was no wonder that on this day he had become tired, body, mind, soul and even socially. He probably even thought about quitting at this point. He didn’t quit, he kept on trucking, and made a lot of money that summer selling door to door, enough to help his with college the next year. When he looked back on his life almost sixty years later he said that he learned more in that one summer with Southwestern company than he learned in any other summer. He grew a lot too. It was something he was happy he had done.

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