Promise of Summer Gold Mine Attracts Students to Midwest

"Summer Employment--$210/Week." This is how the Southwestern Company of Nashville, Tenn., last week advertised its need for door-to-door dictionary salesmen.

The advertisements, posted around campus, neither had University approval nor stated the nature of the jobs available. "Must relocate for the summer and work hard," were the only qualifications the orange leaflets mentioned.

"If the ads had said sales, most people would not have come," James W. Calder, a sales manager for Southwestern, said Tuesday. "People are just not open-minded about sales jobs," he added.

Calder is one of 170 representatives of the Southwestern Company, a subsidiary of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation. He has traveled around the country all winter, recruiting college students to peddle this summer a special edition of Webster's New World Dictionary.

The advertisements attracted over 80 students Tuesday to four recruiting meetings at which they heard Calder deliver his polished presentation.

The tall, lanky Southerner told his audiences that his company is looking for "hard working, independent and ambitious" young men and women; men who could move up in the company after a few summers' work, as he had.

Calder said that selling develops responsibility and gives young people the opportunity to learn how to work in the "real world."

After talking for about twenty minutes, Calder had not yet mentioned anything about dictionaries. He had talked about opportunity, about skills which students need, and especially about money.

He estimated that a student could earn about $2300 during the summer. "Couldn't everyone here use that money?" he asked.

After asking students who were not interested to leave, Calder talked for an hour about the job. After a week-long salesmanship course in Nashville, Tenn., each student would be assigned to a midwestern town for thirteen weeks, he said.

Student employees would live in the homes of teachers and clergymen, "the kinds of people who would house college students trying to get ahead," Calder explained.

Calder said he expected students to work 75 hours a week, knocking on over 3000 doors. Employees would sell dictionary sets at $20.95 each, for a commission of ten dollars a set.

Finally Calder carefully removed a sample dictionary set from his briefcase and displayed it to the students. He and two of the seven Harvard students who worked for Southwestern last year demonstrated their sales techniques to the class.

As they leafed through the pages, the men "pitched" on the value of the book and the usefulness of the accompanying student study guides.

Jack Smith '75, one of the students who worked last year, had students in the audience read aloud the definition of "spider" in the two dictionaries, pointing out the difference between the junior and the ordinary dictionary.

By the end of the day, ten students had signed contracts to work for Southwestern this summer.

"I'd like to do it because I could use the money and have no other summer job," a student who just signed with Southwestern said Tuesday.

The others also seemed more impressed by the money they could earn than by the opportunity to learn new skills.

But whether students will realize Calder's monetary promises is unclear. Allen W. Levy '73, who worked for Southwestern two years ago, said Tuesday that he thought the average income of a student salesman was between $1200 and $1400 each summer. He said he had done well, but that he had refused to sell it again because he had no faith in the product.

The Harvard salesmen Calder brought with him had a different point of view. They said they believe in what they are selling and that they each made between $2800 and $6000 last summer.

Calder said his company sells books to "middle class families, people who don't know much about books and whose children could benefit from them." He refused to call selling "manipulation," preferring the term "persuasion."

Describing his sales technique as "showing them the goods and seeing if they'll buy," he compared it "to asking a girl out on a date.