If I have to lay an egg for my country, I'll do it: Bob Hope
I mostly managed to stay out of trouble during High School. My attendance was good enough and my grades were fine, rather than spectacular.
Some of my friends were not so academically gifted or perhaps just unlucky.
In those long gone days, if you failed to pass certain academic subjects, like English, you were required to attend what was called Summer School to make up for your poor performance during the main school year. Rather than learning a lot, I suspect it was just a sort of punishment meted out to miscreants. Johnnie Temple (known as Triple-Tit Temple, as like Francisco Scaramanga in the Man with the Golden Gun he did indeed have three nipples) and Robert Taylor (known as Towbar) were two such summer school attendees.
Unfortunately, this coincided with a job opportunity via my Old Man (OM).
OM had a great business idea. Already having set the milk business on fire, he decided to branch out into eggs.
In those distant days the milk business was about milk, almost exclusively. It’s true that there was a small freezer in the truck which carried Ice Cream, and sometimes Meyer’s Dairy would have a promotion for (say) fruit drinks.
Usually the OM paid little attention to such efforts to drum up business, but when they started offering prizes to the milkman who shifted the most fruit drink he suddenly became like a demon possessed.
He had the other poor smucks at a disadvantage. Although his round was not necessarily the largest, and he may not have been the greatest salesman; it did have one distinct advantage. The OM had developed such a relationship with some customers that they would more or less let him deliver whatever he wanted to. So, he would load their garages with fruit drink, not charge them for it and thereby win the prize – once it was a portable TV. Then we the contest was over he would denude their garages, slowly, and eventually shift the overstocked drink.
Now,when the OM had an idea usually the whole family was roped in to help. His egg idea consisted of getting a small truck (from who knows where), driving up to an egg farm somewhere near St. Joseph, Missouri as I recall, load it up with eggs and bring them home, which at that time was on 23rd Street in Independence, Mo. The eggs then had to be “candled”. A bright light was shone through the egg to make sure it was OK and fit for human consumption. He loved finding a “double-yoker” which was owing to the random propensity for chickens to produce one.
Now-a-days I suspect candling is done on an industrial scale and perhaps it was then, but the deal he made with the egg producers in St Joe was for wholesale eggs - I expect he got them cheap for it was the Kauffmans who were the labour force for candling.
Sum total: he had eggs to sell.
In theory he could have just put some on his milk truck and sold them as extras, but Meyer’s Dairy were not altogether stupid and he knew they would not allow that.
So, he purchased a beat-up 57 Plymouth station wagon to serve as Egg Delivery Central.
(aside – it was in the old beat-up Plymouth that I taught Linda Taylor to drive).
All that was required now was a sales force to hawk the eggs and build a recurring round of satisfied egg customers who would buy eggs on a regular basis, say a dozen or two twice a week.
American ingenuity and free enterprise now had one of its finest moments!
My Mom was in charge of recruiting the sales force. She picked me (of course), Johnnie Temple, Robert Taylor and Mousy McMillian.
Because Temple and Taylor were deep in the doghouse of Summer School we had to pick them up from WCHS at about 13:00 before we could go and try to sell any eggs.
Mom drove to WCHS; we picked up the two miscreants and, obviously, before we could sell any eggs we had to eat, so Mom would take us to Maconalds on 24 Hi-way for some lunch. and it’s still there! (11700 US-24, Independence, MO 64054)
We would then go and try to sell eggs. I wish I could remember who decided where to go, but alas I have no idea. The routine was simple. Mom would park up on some suburban street, we would get out armed with a few cartons of eggs and knock on doors, trying to sell them, but more importantly, trying to get folks to sign up for regular egg deliveries.
My salesmanship was poor, so was Towbar’s, Johnnie Temple could sell sand to the Arabs and Mousey wasn’t completely hopeless. Temple, in particular, saw this as an opportunity to meet pretty girls, and as it was the school holidays teenage girls often were the ones who answered the door bell.
We sold quite a few eggs and signed up some customers for regular deliveries. Things were going well.
I believe that he downfall of the egg round plan was mostly to do with the shoestring budget that the OM devoted to it. He bought the eggs cheap and his sales-force was had for only the price of a Big Mac or two; the crappy Plymouth was just about serviceable for delivering eggs and all seemed promising.
But, the whole thing was built on a house of cards. Thanks mostly to Triple-tit Temple we could sell eggs and sign-up customers; and had the OM had sufficient financial backing to employ an on-going sales and delivery force it might have led to a real business with real profits.
Alas, it eventually petered out. Having to drive to St Joe to collect eggs cost time and money. Candling the eggs was time consuming and left little time for the kind of entrepreneurial oversight that was required to make a real go of it.
Now, if the OM were still alive, no doubt he would have a completely different take on it, though, to his credit, I don’t ever remember him bemoaning the demise of the egg round while he was alive.
From the workforce’s standpoint it did provide an interesting summer vacation job and a lot of burgers.
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