Traveling salesmen were some things for sure, but they were not primarily a joke in prairie farm country in Montana in the ’50s.
~They were mostly unnecessary. Farmers did not plan to buy things from traveling salesmen because if they needed something they went to town and bought it and figured the business of acquisition was best handled that way. They didn’t think it showed good judgment to make unplanned purchases from an unknown source with limited inventory who showed up uninvited. That just didn’t makes sense on a lot of levels.
The one exception to that rule for our family was the Watkins man. His presence and the fragrance that wafted in the door with him was always welcome, along with his merchandise.
The smell of Watkins salve takes me back to the kitchen on a November night at the end of the day, or to a cold and windy
April afternoon as Dad comes in for coffee. The chapping of his hands from the raw work of repairing barbed wire fences takes him to the old red can to spread on some farmer-style healing. After darkness falls on such a day, the pungent aroma lingers in the living room where he had spent the evening reading before heading to bed after banking the coal for the night.**
~They were a nuisance. They didn’t have a clue about how not to be a pest during spring planting, fall harvesting, evening chores or afternoon gardening. Half the time they didn’t know how to drive in the mud or change a tire, so the local farmers helped them out when they got in trouble on the roads.
Their most costly act of ignorance was when, in order to go to where they could see the farmer in some distant field, they opened a barbed wire gate that allowed them to drive through the fence to get to where he was. They would blithely drive through, leaving the gate laying on the ground thus inviting the ever-alert cattle to head for the greener grass on the other side.
~They were a perceived threat because of the unknowns. No one one knew exactly who they were and where they were from or if the only reason they were a traveling salesman was because they couldn’t hold a decent job.
Strangers on our little red scoria roads in eastern Montana were met with the same suspicion as an unrecognized small plane flying north to south. [We were only fifty miles from the Canadian border. These were the Deep Freeze Years of The Cold War. B-52s flew regular patterns over our farms.]
If I were an artist I could paint Mom’s back as she stood at the
locked kitchen door listening through the screen as a salesman chooses his words carefully, hoping to gain entrance. I see her left hand pressing firmly down on the screen door hook and her right hand behind her back holding a big kitchen knife.
If she grabbed a knife on her way to answer the door…(and) if the back screen door was not already tightly closed, we would scoot down the…steps to hook it as well.
We didn’t take kindly to strangers on our roads, in our yards, or in our air. Blanche DuBois wouldn’t have done too well depending on the kindness of strangers in our part of the prairie.* We weren’t hateful but we knew there was no help to be had if something went wrong in our yard or on our farm so butcher knives and screen door hooks were valued home security systems. They were our U-2 flights. Our Mutually Assured Destruction.**
So – not knowing who it held, any time we saw a strange car turn into the yard we would run flying to tell Dad or Mom calling out, “Somebody’s here” – instead of giving a name – and that told them it was a stranger. If we saw them soon enough that they were met by a one of our parents at the car, they were politely sent on their way and never got the door open.
One day we had an unusual situation develop which, by sunset, had all the farms on our end of the country in a bit of an uproar.
A little before noon, a strange car drove into our large yard, swung around in a U-turn and stopped in front of the sidewalk leading to the front door just long enough for a nicely-dressed young woman in her twenties to disembark. The car sped out of the yard and disappeared down the road before Mom, working in the kitchen as usual, even had time to get to the door.
By the time the young woman was climbing our front steps to be greeted through the screen door, her ride was long out of sight and headed north. She began her monologue, hesitating as she worked her way through an introduction to what she wanted us to buy – either assuming or hoping that this farm family would ignore the fact that she had been unceremoniously dumped on us – and left on foot.
She didn’t look all that strong. Looked kind of hungry and little cowed. I was just a youngster understanding enough to know there was much wrong with this situation and wondering what Mom would do. It was a little scary because it just made no sense at all, either for a farm wife or a farm kid.
Mom let her in. Sat her down at the kitchen table. Offered her a sandwich which she accepted with gratitude. Gave her a glass of milk or a cup of coffee. I don’t remember which. And started trying to get her to explain why she was just dumped off and left with no ride.
Because our farms had no phones and no easy way to check with one another on such things that might concern us – I was immediately sent out to climb up on the roof of the vegetable cave (an underground storage area with a stairway and roof rising to about 8′ on the front end and accessible by a bit of a stretch on the north end where it was mostly buried under a high mound of hardened and permanent dirt). Standing on the cave roof, I could see through and over enough of our trees to track the car that had dropped her off. Where was he going? Was he dumping her? Or was there a plan to return for her? What on earth was he up to? No good, obviously.
I saw him drive the 3/4 mile to our mail box, turn right, and head for our near neighbors about another half mile on the narrow dirt road, and made a right turn up their much shorter driveway. Eventually he drove out of sight and there was no way to know where he had gone.
Now we have a problem. We have a young woman who is a stranger in the area and she has no transportation. We have a no-good-man who left here and we don’t know where he’s gone or if he’ll be back.
The story she gave Mom while I was on the roof doing reconnaissance was that she was supposed to walk to other homes to try to make sales while he was driving to some homes miles further away. And he would return to pick her up.
How would he know where to pick her up??? None of that made any sense. Mom did not want her leaving on foot. That certainly didn’t make any sense either, but after a couple of hours the young woman left on foot – uncomfortable with continuing to sit in this kitchen where people were obviously concerned about her, she unable to provide answers that would relieve them of both uncertainty and responsibility.
Wearing her simple summer dress and the shoes not suitable for walking, she headed down our long road carrying her little suitcase of products. Again I was dispatched to the cave roof to watch – as long as I could see her. Somewhere over the next ninety minutes, she finally disappeared from sight. (On our prairie there were no trees between us and any horizon except for the belts of trees right around the farmsteads. We could watch our dog run away for two days.)
That same evening, a farmer here and a farmer there got the car out after he was done with his day’s field work and drove over to the neighbor’s to be sure they were ok, and to see if anyone could be sure she had actually been picked up at some point. After consulting with one another, they concluded that she had been picked up, that the pair left the area and all was well once again.
Most unseemly and most disconcerting.
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~Now available at Amazon~
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