Grinding It Out (6 page)

My boss was a shrewd operator named John Clark, a man who could recognize sales talent when he saw it. I didn't see his true colors for several years, after he made a bargain with me that the devil himself would have been proud of. Clark was president of Sanitary Cup and Service Corporation, whose biggest stockholders were a pair of bachelor brothers in New York by the name of Coue. This corporation was the exclusive Midwest distributor for Lily brand cups, which were manufactured by Public Service Cup Company. They made cups in several different sizes, from one ounce on up to sixteen ounces. These were rather primitive containers by today's standards. The larger ones had to be pleated and then coated with paraffin wax to make them rigid enough to hold liquids, and they had rims that were limp and floppy.

I peddled these cups all over Chicago. I sold lots of the smaller sizes to Italian pushcart vendors who filled them with flavored ice and sold one ounce for a penny, two ounces for two cents, and five ounces for a nickel. They called them “squeeze cups” because you would squeeze the bottom and force the ice up to lick it. I sold soft drink cups to concessions at Lincoln Park and Brookfield zoos, to beaches, racetracks, and, of course, to the baseball parks. I used to needle my friend Bill Veeck up in Wrigley Field, trying to get him to stock more cups for Cub games. Bill wasn't very promotion minded in those days. He became a much different guy when he owned the baseball teams himself. I was always on the lookout for new markets, and I found them in some strange places. Italian pastry shops, for example, could be sold “squat-size” cups for pastry and spumoni. They would buy a lot of them for big picnics, weddings, and religious festivals. I also learned that Polish places in the old Lawndale neighborhood would buy the same cups to serve “Povidla,” which was a prune butter. Those folks ate an awful lot of prune butter.

America had become an ice cream society in the last years of the twenties, thanks in large part to Prohibition. Bars and fine lounges in hotels sold ice cream, because they could no longer sell liquor, and dairy bars began to crop up all over the country. It was an incredible era. The straitlaced Cal Coolidge, who assured the nation that his fiscal probity had brought prosperity here to stay, moved the White House to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the summer and celebrated the Fourth of July by parading around in a cowboy costume. Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the Yankees for the stupefying figure of $70,000 a year. Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris. Al Jolson sang in the first talking pictures. And—wonder of wonders—in 1929 the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant!

Big things were happening in the paper container industry. A paper milk bottle called the Sealcone was introduced by a New York dairy. Sealcone had no closure, the housewife had to snip off the top with a scissors, so it didn't drive glass bottles from the nation's doorsteps as predicted. But the same technology that produced the Sealcone, using paraffined spruce fiber, was utilized by the makers of Tulip cups. When that firm merged with Lily Cup in 1929, it gave me a “straight-sided” cup that was much more rigid and adaptable to other container uses. It allowed me to go after sales to coffee vendors and cottage cheese packers. The merger of Lily and Tulip was wonderful, a big step forward. The year's most notorious event, however, took the entire country several giant steps backward. It was the stock market crash, which ushered in the Great Depression.

My father was one of the large losers in the economic collapse. After he had given up his position in New York in 1923 and returned to Chicago, taking a demotion to please my mother, he began working out his frustrations by speculating in real estate. That was probably the fastest-building bubble in the whole inflation-bloated country. Newspapers and magazines in the late twenties were full of advertisements for correspondence courses that were guaranteed to help you get rich quick in real estate. My father didn't need to take any of those courses. He owned property scattered all over northeastern Illinois. I remember that he bought a corner lot on Madison Street in Oak Park one month and sold it to an automobile dealership the following month at a handsome profit. The real astonisher, however, was a lot he bought in Berwyn for $6,000 and sold a short time later for $18,000!

Father seemed to have a Midas touch when it came to picking property. He was so busy pyramiding his landholdings, though, that he somehow failed to see—as we all failed to see—whatever warnings there might have been of the impending crash. When the market collapsed, he was crushed beneath a pile of deeds he could not sell. The land they described was worth less than he owed. This was an unbearable situation for a man of my father's principled conservatism. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1930. He had worried himself to death. On his desk the day he died were two pieces of paper—his last paycheck from the telegraph company and a garnishment notice for the entire amount of his wages.

Another piece of paper discovered among my father's effects was a yellowed document dated 1906. It was a phrenologist's report of a reading he had done on the bumps of the head of Raymond A. Kroc, aged four. He had predicted that I would become a chef or work in some branch of food service. I was amazed at the prognostication; after all I was in a food service–related business and felt a real affinity for kitchens. Little did I know how much more accurate that old boy's prophesy would eventually prove to be.

In 1930 I made a sale that not only gave Lily Tulip Cup Company a big boost in volume but also gave me an insight into a new direction for paper cup distribution. I was selling our little pleated “souffle” cups to the Walgreen Drug Company, a Chicago firm that was just starting a period of tremendous expansion. They used these cups for serving sauces at their soda fountains. Observing the traffic at these soda fountains at noon, I perceived what I considered to be a golden opportunity. If they had our new Lily Tulip cups, they could sell malts and soft drinks “to go” to the overflow crowds. The Walgreen headquarters was at Forty-third Street and Bowen Avenue at that time, and there was a company drugstore just down the street. I presented my pitch to the food service man, a chap named McNamarra. He shook his head and threw up his hands at my suggestion.

“You're crazy, or else you think I am,” he protested. “I get the same fifteen cents for a malted if it's drunk at the counter, so why the hell should I pay a cent and a half for your cup and earn less?”

“You would increase your volume,” I argued. “You could have a special area at the counter where you would sell these things, put covers on them, and take them and the same vanilla wafers or crackers you serve with them at the fountain and drop them in a bag to take out.”

Mac's face got redder than usual at that and he rolled his eyes toward heaven as if pleading to be delivered from this madman. “Listen, how can I possibly make a profit if I go to this extra expense? Then you want me to waste my clerk's time putting covers on drinks and stuffing them in bags? You are dreaming.”

One day I said, “Mac, the only way in this world that you can increase your soda fountain volume is to sell to people who don't take up a stool. Look, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I will
give
you 200 or 300 containers with covers, however many you need to try this for a month in your store down the street. Now most of your takeout customers will be Walgreen employees from headquarters here, and you can conduct your own marketing survey on them and see how they like it. You get the cups free, so it's not going to cost you anything to try it.”

Finally he agreed. I brought him the cups, and we set the thing up at one end of the soda fountain. It was a big success from the first day. It wasn't long before McNamarra was more excited about the idea of takeouts than I was. We went in to see Fred Stoll, the Walgreen purchasing agent, and set up what was to be a highly satisfactory arrangement for both of us. The best part of it for me personally was that every time I saw a new Walgreen's store going up it meant new business. This sort of multiplication was clearly the way to go. I spent less and less time chasing pushcart vendors around the West Side and more time cultivating large accounts where big turnover would automatically winch in sales in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. I went after Beatrice Creamery, Swift, Armour, and big plants with in-factory food service systems such as U.S. Steel. I sold them all, and my success brought me more territory to cover and more possibilities.

One day an order was sent down from Lily Tulip's headquarters in New York that because of the depression everyone was obliged to take a ten percent pay cut. In addition, because prices had dropped on gas, oil, and tires, all car allowances would be cut from fifty dollars a month to thirty dollars.

I was then sales manager and John Clark called me into his office to give me the news.

“Close the door, Ray, I want to talk privately with you,” he said. Then he told me how much he appreciated my hard work, how well the company thought of my production, but I would have to take a salary and expense cut. It applied to everyone, across the board.

This was a real blow. It wasn't the reduction in salary that bothered me, but the affront to my ego. How could they treat the best salesman they had in this arbitrary fashion? I knew how much money I was making for them, depression or not, and I felt cold fury rising in me. I looked at him for a long minute, and then I said, very quietly, “Well, I'm sorry, but I can't accept that.”

“Ray, you have no alternative.”

Now, when I get excited or agitated, my voice goes up in register and in volume. I was really agitated now.

“The hell I don't have an alternative,” I yelled. “I'm quittin'. I'm giving two weeks' notice right now, and if you want me to leave today, I'll leave today.”

Mr. Clark was shaken by my outburst, but he managed to keep his voice fairly steady. “Come on now, Ray. Calm down. You're not going to leave and you know it. This is too big a part of your life. It is your life. You belong here with your company and your men.”

I tried to control my temper. “I know it's my life…” I started; then my voice went up again, “But goddammit, I'm not going to hold still for this. When times were good I got little enough in the way of rewards.…” Now I was shouting again. “Unacceptable. This is unacceptable, that I be put on the same basis with some of the people who are cost problems to the corporation. Those people—you know who they are—they're part of the overhead in this company. I'm part of the creative. I bring in the money, and I'm not gonna put myself in the same category with them!”

“Ray, listen a minute. I'm taking a cut myself.”

“Take it. That's your prerogative. Take it, brother, but I won't accept it. I will not!”

I knew he must have been squirming inside, imagining the sound of our voices carrying through the walls to the horrified secretaries and clerks in the outer office. But I didn't give a damn, and the more he tried to soothe me and assure me that the policy was designed to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, to protect all our jobs while times were bad, the madder I got. The capper was when he said that after I thought it over I would understand that it was the only fair way to handle it.

“I can understand it, perfectly,” I said as I stood up to walk out of the office. “But I refuse to accept it. This company has already squeezed me out of pennies. Now, the minute things get a little tough, I'm supposed to sacrifice dollars. Well, I'm not doing it. You can have your damned job with its ten percent pay cut. I'm quittin' and that's that.”

When I left the office that day, I took my sample case with me. I said nothing to my wife about what had occurred. I knew how upset she would be if she learned I had quit my job. To her, what I had done would be indefensible. I'm hotheaded and proud, and I felt my action was justified. I was a little frightened about my future, but I concealed it and acted as though nothing had happened.

Each morning I left home at the usual time, carrying my sample case. I would ride the elevated train to a corner in the Loop where there was an automat I used as a headquarters for reading through want ads over a cup of coffee. Then I'd set out on the day's round of job interviews.

I was looking for work that offered something more than money, something I could really get involved in. But there were no jobs of any kind, it seemed. There were a dozen or more men for every opportunity, if one can stretch that word to cover the most mundane tasks. I felt some of the starch begin to seep out of me after three or four days, but I was determined that I would never go back to Lily Tulip hat in hand. After about the fourth day of this, when I went home, my wife greeted me with a look that would have withered crabgrass.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

“What do you mean, where have I been?”

“Mr. Clark called here. He wants to know where you are.”

“Where am I?”

“Ray, don't be funny. Something's fishy here. I told him you are going in every morning, but he said he hasn't seen you for the last four days. Don't you go into the office every morning? What are you doing? What's going on?”

I hemmed and hawed about taking some “future orders,” but I wasn't very convincing.

“Well, Mr. Clark said he wants to see you first thing in the morning,” she said. “You will be there, won't you?”

I felt trapped. I hated being put on the defensive. I walked away, but she kept after me like the determined Scot she was, telling me to answer her. So I whirled around and let her have it.

“I can't take those cheapskates down there any more,” I blurted. “I'm quittin'!”

Zingo! Her jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. Then she really lit into me. I was betraying her and our daughter. My pride was jeopardizing our existence. She stormed on about my foolishness, how desperate times were, how difficult it was for anyone to find a job (I
knew
that!). But I had taken my stand. I wasn't going to back down, regardless. I couldn't. Everything in me resisted it.