Bob Hill: The Christmas assignment that made me a writer
None of my life’s Christmas intentions ever included riding a bicycle around a department store in hot and humid Houston Texas in December, honking a horn and wearing a Santa Claus suit. It all required a certain set of circumstances, like getting all my theoretical elves in a row. But if you ever get the opportunity – say Dillard’s in Mall St. Matthews – get on board and honk. It all ended merrily for me.
It was 1964
But the beginning, not so good. The year was 1964. I had just graduated from Rice University in Houston with a degree in Commerce. I had actually majored in basketball with a minor in interdisciplinary gym rat and critical pool-hall theory.
I had no idea how smart I was. I had gotten out of a very good university in four years, but with no real sense what I wanted to be, or could be. This became all too apparent when at the end of my senior year – and already married two years – I began the interview process for jobs at the university’s career center.
Most of the potential employers were seeking engineers – Rice’s primary raison d’etre in the day, and I figured I was somewhat nervously employable. I tried to sell commerce but the job interviewers were all about calculus. They were polite, asked all the expected questions, not quite condescending and very brief.
More:'T'was the night before Christmas': A holiday poem for the garden lover
One of the worst days of my life was when I visited the career center to give a commerce degree one more try and the guy there said, in an almost fatherly-sad tone, “Bob, I’m sorry, but we have no more job interviews scheduled.”
“But, wait a minute,” I am thinking, a thought no doubt echoed by a few million college seniors since,” I have a degree from this very prestigious university and I can’t get a job?”
My wife, Janet, had similar thoughts. So did our landlord. Temporarily, salvation came from a basketball teammate – a math major who did get a job – who suggested a career in the retail business.
Which led me to a Montgomery Ward store in suburban Houston, a retail chain that would go out of business in 2001, a fate of which I may have had a hand. Or, as it turned out, two feet.
My designation was “management trainee.” The first day on the job I spoke with the store manager, a guy who seemed even more unsure of his place in life than I was. I answered all his expected questions and was first assigned – go figure – to the sports equipment department. It did have a pool table.
More:There's a reason we sing about it. Why the real symbol of Christmas should be a holly tree
Already sensing my place in retail as being an eight ball in the side pocket, I wanted to quit the first week. My wife – and more indirectly our landlord – had other ideas. Unlike today’s culture, this was a time when you had to give any job at least six months.
What little thought I had of surviving retail, fully died the morning the Montgomery Ward regional manager came in for a store-wide pep talk. He had been advertised as a retail marketing god, a guy in charge of 40 regional stores and earning more than $40,000 a year (in 1964) when my beginning trainee salary was $440 a month, roughly $110 a week. Worse than that, we were paid in cash. Stuffed in a brown envelope. So try walking quickly out of a retail store – especially a sporting goods department – with cash in your pocket.
About 30 of us retailers were spread out in chairs and sofas in the furniture department when our regional sales god showed up. He was well dressed, cocky and stocky, with long, carefully combed hair. He quickly launched into a furniture-sales pep talk like a football coach down 28 to 7 at half-time.
He started slowly, then, building to a crescendo, he shouted – and I am not making this up – “Everyone who wants to sell a sofa stand up and holler!’’
As I looked around I noticed I was the only one in the room who had remained seated. And silent. Not long afterward I was again seated in our store manager’s office giving my “I’m out-of-here” notice. It was early December and my six months was about up. The manager confessed he was leaving, too.
The next day he called me into his office and handed me a Santa Claus suit. The powers that be had decided I would end my retail career as a visitor from the North Pole.
More:I'm a Rabbi who loves Christmas movies because Hanukkah is prone to the same holiday woes
I would have worse assignments.
Part of this one would be sitting in a tall chair wearing a white beard and red hat with little kids piled in my lap. The looks I got were magical. My turn as a god. No wish went unfulfilled. No dream discouraged. No photo denied. Yeah, sure, I had to hedge a little big on the big items, and tell some tales about Rudolph and the reindeer, but pushing disappointment was not part of my job description.
And Mom and Dad were about 15 safe feet away.
Nor did I abandon my short-term buddies in the sports department. I began making daily trips there to borrow a bicycle and rode up and down the store aisles in my Santa Suit honking a horn and shouting “Ho, Ho, Ho” and “Merry Christmas”: “Warning to shoppers, Santa Claus with horn on a bike in aisle six.”
What were they going to do, fire me?
Then I gave myself a present. I had been thinking quite a bit about this career thing, figured I needed to go with what I liked best, and decided to get into writing for a living.
Merry Christmas!
Bob Hill was a Louisville Times and Courier Journal feature writer and columnist for 33 years.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Bob Hill: The Christmas assignment that made me a writer
