When I went back to work for Coca Cola at the Fair in 1940, I had hoped that job might lead to something more permanent with the company, and my bosses gave me some encouragement along this line.

But the management crew hired to run the Fair office were borrowed from various other places, and they had no sense of responsibility to me or the other temporary employees. I went to a couple of the plants in the Bay area when the Fair operation finally shut down in October, but none of the plants in the surrounding area seemed to be interested in me.

So I went back to the Bureau of Occupations at U. C. for job leads, and was sent to several places.

One of them was the San Francisco office of The Quaker Oats Company. The regional sales manager interviewed me, and at the end of the interview he said that I didn't seem aggressive enough in responding to him. But he gave me a chance to come back again a couple of weeks later.

What he considered my lack of aggressiveness was due partly to the advice given to me earlier to be a good listener and to try to find out what the employer wants instead of being too brassy. But I realized that if this was what the interviewer wanted, I should try to satisfy him. So the second time I tried to be as forceful and self confident as I could manage, although this clashed with the way I had been taught to deal with adults.

This time (or maybe I had to come back a third time), I got the job. I was to be what was called a "specialty salesman", calling on retail grocery stores in northern Utah and southern Idaho.

To show that I was diligent in my calls, I was expected to take orders for Quaker products that the grocer wanted, although the wholesale houses (called jobbers) also had salesmen who called regularly on these customers. In the cities, the grocers could also call the jobber directly, or pick up their own orders if the store was too small to merit regular deliveries.

My training began just after Christmas in 1941. It consisted of travelling for two weeks with the salesman who covered the territory from Salt Lake City south. This territory was compact enough for the salesman to live at home in Salt Lake City. So I stayed in a rooming house and ate at a boarding house during this time.

During my months at the Fair, I had lived with some other fellows in an apartment in Berkeley. But eating at a boarding house was a new experience. There must have been at least thirty men and women who ate at this particular place. The atmosphere had touches of "family" in it, yet was impersonal enough to make me feel awkward most of the time.

Most of southern Utah struck me as being barren and unappealing, both in the natural scenery and in the scattered signs of habitation. There were various towns along the way, of course, but in 1941 the population was much smaller.

At the end of the training period, I was provided with my predecessor's two year old Ford, and the individual store records for my territory. I was also loaded up with all sorts of advertising materials which were to be set up in the customers' stores wherever permitted, and a sample kit which displayed some of the company products in glass tubes. I soon learned that the local merchants were not interested in the sample kit, but only in how the product sold.

My first calls were made in Ogden, one of the two largest cities in my territory. The other was Boise, Idaho. Small loose leaf binders contained charts of the Quaker products stocked in each store, and my first job whenever I came into the store was to go down the shelves checking off the Quaker items, looking for those the grocer did not carry and for stock that might be reordered. I can still see in my mind's eye the pages which were blurred by snowflakes as I went around the stores in Ogden on my first trip.

The snowy weather exposed me to the experience of driving in snow and ice, and in applying and removing chains. Once I skidded off the road into a snowbank, but without damage. I was particularly relieved to discover the car wasn't hurt because by then I had acquired a new company car and was extremely anxious to keep it unblemished.

Except for the days I spent in Ogden and the week I spent covering the Boise area, I had to plan my route and schedule to end at a new destination every day, so I could be at the door of a store when it opened the next morning. This involved a lot of driving after store hours, and I spent many a night in a small hotel in a town which offered few amusements for the traveler. Looking back, I realize that I could have explored more opportunities for recreation than I did, but I wanted to make good on the job and not waste time or energy.

One of the more colorful aspects of my job, in several ways, was to set up demonstrations of Aunt Jemima pancake flour in stores on Saturdays. The civil rights movement was a long way off at the time, and Aunt Jemima was not seen as a symbol of racial discrimination, so far as most white customers were concerned. In fact, many probably didn't think of the product in those terms at all.

Part of the setup for one of these demonstrations was to hire a black woman from Salt Lake City to come to the store, dressed according to the picture on the package, and "be" Aunt Jemima. I dealt with the reality of the character the way most parents deal with Santa Claus, without actually lying but giving the impression to the credulous that they were gazing upon the famous character in person.

My most successful demonstration was in a little town in eastern Idaho in the middle of a valley which was cut off to a large extent from the rest of the world. I discovered that many of the natives had never seen a "colored" person, so it was really sensational to have a famous one appear there.

Her appearance caused a crisis, however, when we found that her train connections required her to stay overnight in the town. The one hotel in town, like most places, did not allow "colored" people to stay there. Most of the towns in the area which did have any black visitors made sure they left town before nightfall. However, an exception was made in this case because the guest was a "celebrity".

On Saturday, the store was crowded. It seemed that the entire population of the valley turned up during the day. The sales of Aunt Jemima pancake flour rose considerably, but many potential customers were obviously more interested in the free show than the free pancakes "Aunt Jemima" dished out.

Since she was a middle aged lady, she had to wear glasses. When people pointed out that she wasn't wearing glasses in the picture on the box, she replied: "Ah been around a lo n g tahm, honey, and old age is creepin' up on me. But my pancakes are as good as ever. Try one!"

While I was in Boise, I stayed in an apartment for which I paid a monthly rent (at company expense). My room was just under the roof, and I was both entertained and annoyed by the scurrying sounds of a squirrel whose nest must have been nearby in a tree or under the eaves.

My territory went from Ogden, as mentioned before, to McCall, Idaho, which is now a popular skiing area. At the time the chief attraction was Payette Lakes, which were frozen over when I first visited there.

Another resort area was Sun Valley. But by the time I got there, the skiing season was over and those still around were mostly the "walking wounded" those who were wearing casts from accidents. It did not inspire me to jump on a pair of skiis.

My territory also took in part of eastern Nevada, as far west as Ely. During the week before the July 4th week end, I worked in western Idaho. On Friday after work, I drove (through a heavy rainstorm) down through the Jordan Valley into Nevada and over Donner Pass to visit my parents who were camping just outside the CCC Camp near Lassen Park where my father was the educational advisor. Because I went through part of my territory on this trip, I felt safe in taking the detour without having problems in justifying the mileage on the speedometer.

One of the compensations for the long hours of working and driving was that I had a chance to think about my future and the condition of the world. The car radio didn't offer much in the way of entertainment. But the news brought home to me, even in this remote part of the country, the growing menace of fascism and Nazism, and the threats to world peace they represented.

When I was still working for Coca Cola, one of my apartment roommates had been Wendell Wollam, son of a Presbyterian pastor whom I met through Cecil Hoffman, the Minister of Christian Education at St. John's Church in Berkeley.

One day Wendell's father Roy Wollam dropped in on us, and he was still there when my own father came by. I had confided to Dr. Wollam that I was considering the ministry as a life work, so he mentioned this to my father, assuming that my father was aware of this and had encouraged me.

My father, taken completely by surprise, replied: "Well, if he does, we can always shoot him."

This blunt response indicated much too clearly than my father intended, I'm sure, what a low opinion he had of clergymen in general, and of the ministry as a calling for one of his sons. Dr. Wollam and the rest of us tried to laugh it off, but the remark stung me and kept doing so for years perhaps even until now.

So even as I kept coming back to the ministry as a possibility in projecting my future, I wanted fervently to make good on this job, to prove to him and to myself, as well as to the company, that I was capable and successful.

However, outside events kept crowding in upon my somewhat isolated life. On my birthday, June 22, I drove into Jackson Hole, Wyoming to have supper and spend the night. As I drove down the winding roads, the car radio brought the grim news that Hitler's armies had invaded Poland, smashing the non aggression pact between Germany and Russia. It was obvious that the war had reached a new stage which was more and more likely to involve the U. S. The bad news was compounded for me by discovering when I got back to the car from supper that some thief had "invaded" the car and had stolen my two cameras.

My draft number was a fairly high one, which helped me to get the Quaker job. But I was still uncertain as to whether I could be a "Christian soldier". The pastor of our church during my childhood and youth, Stanley Hunter, was a strong pacifist who never allowed the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers" to be sung if he could help it. As a student, I had represented our church on the Peace Committee at U. C., which reflected the anti war spirit of many students in those times. It seemed clear to many of us that there ought to be better ways of resolving international disputes than the traditional methods of fighting between nations, especially when issues often remained unsettled at the end of a terrible slaughter.

The collapse of the Maginot Line and the fall of France were blows to the cause of democracy, and these worried us. But I kept hoping, like many Americans, that our country could avoid becoming involved in actual combat in Europe so we could be a force for reconciliation when tyranny was finally overcome.

This hope faded more and more as the months went by, but I saw the possibility of the ministry as a way of serving my Lord and my country at the same time.

Finally I decided that if I were to enroll in a seminary, I should start in the Fall. If not, I might find myself drafted and thus be lost to the Quaker Oats Company too, since my sales job had a very low priority for exemption.

So in late summer, I went around on my last trip and told my customers I was planning to become a minister. Many of these grocers were pillars of the Mormon Church, and in my naïveté I thought they would be pleased. But I was quickly reminded that they regarded any church but theirs as heretical, so in becoming a Presbyterian minister I was planning to work for the enemy even more zealously than as a benighted layman.

This was just one example of the bigotry of these people. They were happy to have me pay for the Cokes that I bought from their coolers, but they frowned on the stuff as a matter of moral principle and church doctrine because it contained caffeine. Some of them would make me stand for half an hour waiting for them to quit shooting the breeze with parishioners, then told me that they had nothing to order that day.

During the war, of course, there was a desperate shortage of ordinary groceries for ordinary people, and salesmen of the kind I had been were temporarily obsolete. But I often fantasied that it would have been a grim satisfaction to have gone back to my job temporarily, so I could have told some of those arrogant grocers that I would "let them have" a few boxes of this or that while they begged for more. But through their Mormon jobbers they probably survived better than the "Gentiles" did.

A more pleasant memory was the time I came into a little store in eastern Idaho and found the young fellow who had been a very junior clerk was now the manager. He gave me a very substantial order for the size of the store. He told me that I had been the only salesman who had paid any attention to him before, so he was rewarding me for that courtesy.

When I told my Presbyterian boss in Salt Lake City that I was quitting to enter the seminary, he was dismayed but not greatly surprised, and he wished me well.

Several years later, while Carol and I were driving through Idaho Falls on a vacation trip, she suggested stopping at a small grocery store for some supplies. As I waited in the car, I realized that the location looked familiar. When I went in, I found myself able to remember the name of the 1941 owners. The man behind the counter turned out to be one of the surviving brothers. When I told him about my previous connection, he commented: "We don't see salesmen around here much any more."