Hello, I'm Ed Heinkel. I'm a salesman, have been all of my life. Maybe not the kind of salesman you might first imagine. Like big ticket items, although I did sell cars once for about a year and I did well, but I'm more like you everyday kind of salesman. I have been in route sales for several companies al of them Fortune 500 companies. I have started at the bottom and have went just about as far as one may go without a college diploma. My story actually started when I was eight years old and I sold flower seeds and greeting cards door to door for prizes.
The story started in 1961. I am now about to turn 56 years old, still running a route. However I am now writing a book. Climbing To The Top! I want to change the title to The Salesman of the Year! My reason for the change is that although I have achieved success with the many vintures in my life, I have made Salesman of the Month many times, I have never made Salesman of the Year for one reason or another. I have been a mustang and made it to several management positions. Just not Salesman of the Year.
This year is my year! In my book I write about the many sales jobs that I've done and I want to finish the book this year with the ending being a happy one by being awarded Salesman of the Year.
Each week I will post about 500 words of my book. Feel free to let me know how you think I'm doing. Be nice, I was not the best of students when I went to school. I also have never written a book before. This is all a first for me. Here is the first 500 words of Climbing To The Top!
It was 1961, I was only eight years old. My mother and father were lower middle class or top of the poor class depending on how you looked at it. They both worked in factories all while I was growing up. I had three sisters and one brother. I was the oldest. Raised by a strict Catholic father, mom came from the Baptist side being she was from the south, that would be south Texas, where children are to be seen and not heard. my father was in the Navy and had been stationed in Corpus Christi when he met my mother. He was from northern Indiana. They came from poor families. My folks tried to give us the best they could afford. They bought an old house that need fixing, and it was it a neighborhood where most other houses looked better than the one they bought. However that seemed right up my dads alley as he loved to be busy fixing it up. Before long it was just as nice as the other homes. Speaking of fixing things it seems he liked to work on cars too. He always bought used Olds-mobiles, and always got the most out of them even if it meant working on then in the dead of winter.
There were a lot of kids in my neighborhood and one of my best friends lived right next door. His family was or seemed better off as his dad was a big boss at the local truck plant and his mom never had to work. My friend always seem to have the newest things and no matter how much I asked my folks for them it just wasn’t going to happen. Though they might try to look like they were keeping up with the Jones, it was just that, look like it. I received a small allowance for doing some chores around the house however it was never going to be much. I was always told if you want it then get a job and save your money. but wait a minute I was only eight years old. Too young to get a job except for raking leaves and shoveling snow, or mowing lawns.
My friends all had baseball gloves and I did not so when we played I’d get to wear my friends when they were up to bat. I sure wanted a glove of my own real bad but my folks just couldn’t afford one for me. My friends and I played like that all summer. The next summer was going to be the start of Wildcat Baseball League, and all of my friends were going to sign up. I started thinking on how I was going to get me one of those gloves for next summer so I too could sign up to be a Wildcat baseball player.
Mr. Dale McMillen, while watching little league tryouts, noticed the disappointment on the faces of the nine and ten year old boys that failed to make the team. This was to much for “Mr. Mac” as he was called, to take. After discussions with other leaders, Mr. Mac organized a league for all boys who wanted to play organized baseball regardless of their skills, race, creed, or religion. The motto of “Everybody Makes the Team” is a vital part of the philosophy of Mr. Mac and the Wildcat League.
Winter came and I proceeded to going around the neighborhood and shoveling snow for what ever people would pay me. I started to save a little and that was just the point, there wasn’t going to be enough money by the time summer got here to be able to get that mitt that I wanted so badly.
One day while my friends and I were sitting around we were looking at comic books. I saw an ad in the back of the comic book for selling flower seeds, and if you were to sell enough you could earn prizes like different toys and balls and guess what? A baseball glove! Wow! Only one problem, I had just enough start up money to get started and that would leave me with nothing but flower seeds, I said one problem, but really there were two, it was February and who was going to want flower seeds this time of the year?
