Saratoga News

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Stereopticon

'Boy salesman' earns Pocket Ben watch by selling Liberty

By Willys Peck

Well, it's happened again. Just as I had described in my previous column, it doesn't take much to release a flood of memories, a circumstance that involves two of my initialized traits: LIP service (Living In the Past) and NTAA (Never Throw Anything Away). The event this time involved the discovery of some 1933 copies of Liberty magazine among a stack of documents my dad had saved.

I think I must have inherited my NTAA trait from my dad, who had been a newspaperman for most of his working career. His last tour of duty was as Saratoga postmaster. Anyway, as a reporter and editor, he saved all kinds of documents that he thought he might need to refer to again, as well as those that just interested him. The result was a ponderous stack of publications that I am reluctant to send out for recycling.

Those Liberty magazines represent a chapter, or maybe just a paragraph, in my life because as a youngster, I was one of what were described as "boy salesmen." This meant I was going door-to-door in a weekly routine. Liberty was a general interest magazine in the same category as Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post, and I always thought of it as being of lesser quality than those other two.

All of those publications sold for 5 cents a copy, and the stipend for boy salesmen was a cent and a half a copy. If I could sell 10 copies, that meant 15 cents, which was what I got per hour for doing yard work. You'll have to remember that we're looking at the 1930s here, when a nickel was a significant sum. It could buy you an ice cream cone, candy bar or a cup of coffee. The song, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime," written in 1932, epitomized those days of the Great Depression.

But, back to Liberty magazine. I don't recall the exact number, but I think my list of regular customers included about a dozen people, some of whom I have an idea just felt sorry for me. Territorially, the route covered a pretty fair area. Needless to say, my bicycle was an essential. There was no way I would have tried to walk those distances, and delivery took me a couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons.

Another facet of remuneration was the coupon system. For each five copies sold, there was a green coupon given. For every five green coupons, there was a brown coupon, or "brownie." There was a catalog of tantalizing premiums that were awarded in exchange for brownies, and I must say, those premiums were a powerful inducement to sell magazines.

My first brownie premium was a Pocket Ben watch, which I treasured as my first real timepiece. What I really yearned for, though, was a 16-millimeter, hand-cranked Keystone movie projector, which was listed as costing 95 brownies. Ninety-five brownies required the sale of 2,375 magazines. As I do the math, it appears those weekly sales would have had to have been more than a dozen, or I would have had been selling more than a couple of years. Somehow, it doesn't seem quite right.

What I do know is, I got the projector because I still have it. I wrote the arrival date on the box, Oct. 28, 1936, and having my own movie projector made me something of a celebrity among my eighth-grade schoolmates. One of the early films I got was a documentary on the coronation of England's King George VI in December 1936. One scene really got to me. It showed the king and queen on a balcony with their daughters, Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II, and Princess Margaret Rose.

Seeing Princess Elizabeth in that film inspired a childish crush on my part. I really fell for that kid and I collected newspaper photos of her. One of my favorite quips was to the effect that if her uncle, Edward VIII, could abdicate as king to marry, as he put it, "the woman I love," maybe his niece could make a similar exit from royalty in the future. Needless to say, nothing ever came of my one-sided infatuation.

My interest in movie projectors has resulted in quite a collection. I got the spare projector from the old Saratoga Theater, along with an unreturned feature film, Ronald Reagan in King's Row. I'll never get that machine operational, but it makes an interesting piece of furniture. Other machines are a 35-millimeter silent projector similar to one Saratoga Grammar School had; a 35-millimeter silent "suitcase projector," and 16- and 8-millimeter machines.