Home on the Farm

The traveling salesman who made the most indelible impression on me visited our farm only once, but he stayed an entire week!  One summer day as I was playing in the yard, a stranger appeared in our driveway.  He was a jolly looking, roly-poly man with a big, brown cigar clamped in his teeth.  His means of transportation was a single-seat buggy, with a black patent leather convertible top, pulled by a small, brown mare.  My mother invited him into the house and we soon discovered his reason for being there.  He was a sales representative for the Home Comfort Company and was peddling wood-burning kitchen ranges door-to-door.  I have no idea how he knew ahead of time that he had come to the right place at precisely the right time, and perhaps he didn’t, but that turned out to be the case anyway. 

For months Mother had been complaining about the great, black, hulking monster of a stove that had occupied a prominent place on one side of our kitchen since well before I was born.  My older brother, Buddy, remembers that range especially well because it was a LAUREL which was his correct first name.  The stove‘s rusty cooking surface had a long crack that extended from front to back and it smoked badly.  The temperature indicator on the oven door no longer worked so that my mother, who was a very good cook, managed to burn some of the pies and other foods she tried to bake in it.  Even the poorest of salesmen could have sold Mother on a new kitchen range at that juncture.   Our visitor was far from the poorest of salesmen as he had a gift of gab that put all of us in awe of him.  And, in addition to his impressive sales pitch, he had a wondrous secret weapon in his arsenal of selling devices.

The secret weapon was a miniature sample range which was a source of continuing delight to my siblings and me.  It was an exact replica of the full-sized stove that later arrived at our house.  The model was about a foot square and was perfect in every detail even down to the tiny handles on the fire pit door and on the oven.  We fell in love with it at first sight.  I remember asking the salesman if we please could keep it as a toy when he was about to leave.  He, of course, had to decline, much to our dismay.  I have since seen a few of those sample stoves in antique shops around the country and they continue to fascinate me to this day.  An interesting side note is that the miniatures now sell for many times what my parents paid for that full-sized range in the 1930‘s.

I don’t know exactly why the salesman stayed for a week, but here is my hypothetical explanation for that turn of events.  Perhaps he lived quite a distance away and used our home as a sort of headquarters for the next several days as he made his rounds offering his merchandise to all our neighbors.  At that time there were few hotels and no motels in the vicinity from which he could have rented a room.  He probably talked my parents into letting him park his horse and buggy in our barn and sleep in our guest room.  As I said earlier, he had a good gift of gab and was a consummate salesman.   I never did know what financial arrangements he made, but I do know that he was treated as an honored guest for his entire stay and even ate his meals with us.  Meals, by the way, that were cooked on the old black kitchen range that was about to be replaced.