The first year on the route I grew it from seventeeth place to eleventh place out of seventeen routes. I had also just gotton a new supervisor, Doug, he had been promoted from route salesman to district manager. He was young and aggressive like me and we got along just fine. He was from Ohio and he new my territory. Together we worked sales and grew the business, after a couple more months my numbers were looking and feeling a lot better. The hours were still getting longer. Doug helped me develop the route to a more manageable way to service the customers with out hurting the levels of service.
My sales were growing I was bringing home a paycheck that was larger that I had ever seen before. I now Darlene was pregnant with our second child. We were ecstatic with joy. I was glad I was providing a larger income. We were going to need it. The house that we were buying needed repairs too. I was fixing it up a little at a time. The money was going to really help.
Over the next few months I set up as many sales as I could and Doug did his part of setting up the sales at the larger customers. I was placing new locations for vending machines. I was talking customers into resets that would move me to a better location in the set. Being first in the shopping pattern was important, even relocating the vending machines closer to the door of the store before Pepsi and 7-UP in line. Doing these things seemed time consuming and tedious but the payoff was better than not doing it at all. My sales grew to the point that sometimes I would need to reload my truck because I didn’t have enough product for a display or to finish the route. I would call Doug and tell him what I needed and sometimes he would bring it all the way to me but, most of the time I would meet him half way between the route and home and exchange trucks then head back out to the route to finish.
In my haste to get caught up on the route or to finish and get home I would stand on the gas and speed, now the trucks had goveners in place and you could only do at the most about 10 miles over the speed limit. I would press it every chance I would get. One week I got stopped be the Ohio State patrol for doing ten miles over the limit. You would think that I would have learned my lesson, but no, in my haste I was stopped by the same officer on the same strech of road as I was stopped one week before. I was however going slower now I was only eight miles an hour over. Two big fines in two weeks, I was going to have a hard time telling Darlene that I had been busted again.
The trucks that we had were pretty old and Coke was in the process of buying new ones and that would be great, however, the top routes woud get them first, I would have to wait a while. I put a lot of wear and tear and miles on my truck. One day in the middle of prety much nowhere I smell smoke it smelled electrical I pulled off to the side of the road and raised the hood only to see flames in those days it wasn’t a requirement to have fire extinguishers in route trucks, I quickly ran to the bay door and grabed a 16 ounce bottle of Coke, popped the cap off and shook up the bottle and sprayed the product on the fire. When I got the fire out I saw that the spark plug wires had been burnt badly. I had to walk to a farm to get to a phone. I could see that this was going to be a hike. I climbed a fence and walked through a field to a farm house as I approached I was greeted by a very large German Shepherd and I felt so scared when, the owner came to my aid and called off the dog. I was able to make the call and get towed.
This would not be my first problems with the equipment that I had to use, another time that I remember was when the truck threw a belt and I had been standing on the front bumper to see what was wrong and I jumped back off and my Marine Corp ring on my right hand got caught and ripped my skin to the nuckle, the ring had to be cut off and my finger bandaged. While on this route I faced several break downs and a couple of stitches. Then my luck changed, another route came open for bid. This route was an in town route back in Ft. Wayne, a lot closer to home. This was good as Doug was still my supervisor. The route had a higher ranking than the Ohio route I had.
