When I was young, I used to hitchhike a lot. It was the 80’s, and well it was still commonplace. Most often I would travel from my hometown of Burks Falls to my older brother’s apartment in Toronto or about 375 kms each way. For about 4 years on Friday of every other week or so I would hitch a ride to Toronto and then hitch a ride back home on Sunday.
The primary objective of the trip was always a Saturday morning trip downtown to visit my favorite big city record shops like The Record Peddler, Records on Wheels and more where I could easily acquire records that reflected my alternative tastes.
It would be easy for me to fill several pages with stories of some of the characters I met during those years but one thing that remained constant was the type of people had that would give me a ride. In a great number of the cases I was the guest in the car to a salesperson and the other type was most often business owners. Makes perfect sense right, hence the term travelling salesman.
Many of the business owners were interesting, some would be chatty about anything but their business, some were all business, and some were just quiet. The quiet ones would make for some boring drives, but I was still grateful for the ride.
Undoubtedly my favorite travelers were the salespeople. They were always the most entertaining. Even when they didn’t go so far as to ask my name, they could spin a story like their life depended on it and they always had a couple of jokes.
In my late teens at the time, I couldn’t imagine how I would be interested in how he sold such and such a client on such and such product but week after week and year after year I would hear story telling in the first degree. One that I remember quite specifically was a heavy equipment salesman that drove me from Muskoka to Barrie.
He was in a great mood because he had just closed a deal with a mining company up north for machines worth over a million dollars. Just to hear him talk about the value of the contract was inspiring to a teenager who wasn’t yet sure what he wanted to do for a career.
This charismatic and seemingly successful salesman regaled me with sales stories during our hour or so together. There was a great story he shared that day that I remember well and didn’t appreciate as much than as I do today.
We were talking about my choices for college that fall, and he cautioned me not to be so set on a single career. He told me that he had two other careers before finding his way to sales which hits home these days, but he also told me a story of one of his clients.
John was a big burly man and seemed like he was a character developed by Hollywood to be the owner of a sawmill and lumber yard in a small northern mining town. His son John Jr. (JJ) had spent summers since he was a little kid helping around the lumber yard, much of the work for compensated with just a pat on the back as JJ explained it. Over time this became a point of conflict as JJ became older and had developed other interests.
Fast forward a couple of years and JJ is off to university. He chooses the school that is as far away from the lumber yard as he could get when he took engineering at Waterloo, more than 1, 000 Kms away from home. JJ graduated from Waterloo and was several years into a successful career as an engineer with a firm in Toronto when he received word of his father’s sudden and without warning passing.
The lumberyard was run by John and his wife took care of the books. They had about a dozen employees but when John Sr. died suddenly, they had no leadership. I am sure you can guess the next part as JJ returned home and started managing the lumberyard and he hated it from the word go.
A few years later a funny thing happened. Overnight he fell in love with the business. He explained to the salesman that he hated the business with a passion. It was when his mom developed cancer that he had an epiphany about the business.
All those years he thought his dad loved the business more than anything in the world. As JJ put it to the salesman “For all I know today he might not have even liked the business, but he built it for me in hope that I would want to be part of it. I am just sorry he had to pass away for me to figure out how much he loved me.”
… that is the best story I heard during those years, and I share it frequently even today. I think it speaks to a generation of men who had trouble communicating with their sons especially. I wonder what might have happened if the father had been more open but most of all I love the sentiment throughout the story. A lot of people will say family is important, it’s not always easy to live it as an entrepreneur.
