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THE MAN OF THE MONTH
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able to lift glove boxes, you're big enough!", Templeton said. "I'll give you a job as stock boy at four dollars a week." Fred Lee looked at Templeton and said, "I'm too big a boy to work for four dollars a week, I want five." Templeton was so astonished that he agreed to it. According to Fred Lee that was the first and last time he has ever asked anyone for a raise.
As a stock boy for Marshall Field's Fred Lee got his first taste of retail' ing. While his only responsibility was to keep the shelves in the glove department filled, he carefully ob' served and studied the various salesmen on the floor. Within a short time Fred Lee knew that he wanted to become a salesman. Stock boys weren't ordinarily allowed to sell; but he was able to make his first sale while still a stock boy.
With very little success, the glove department had been trying to move a lot of muleskin gloves. One day Fred Lee noticed an elderly gentleman looking at the gloves. He approached the old man with the idea of selling him a pair and in short time he had not only sold a pair, but the entire lot to the man!
THIS was Fred Lee's first sale; and it whetted his interest in selling, more than ever. After less than a year as a stock boy with Marshall Field's, he went to work, again as a stock boy, for a wholesale millinery company in Chicago. The company's peak season was a six weeks' period in the fall. During these weeks the millinery house was
so busy even the stock boys went out on the floor to sell.
"We would be out on the floor all day long selling," Mr. Lee recalled, "and then we'd have to come back at night to take care of the stockroom. They paid us fifty cents a night to do this." By this time he was making fifteen dollars a week.
More ambitious to sell than ever, young Fred took his first road job as a traveling dry goods salesman. He carried trunks of samples to small towns in northern Illinois, selling to village shops and general stores.
Fred Lee remembers his road job as a pretty discouraging life. "I was always on the move, and always lugging those two huge trunks by the best means available. Roads in those days weren't what they are now, and a good part of my travel was with a team and wagon over miles of muddy farm roads.
"One night," Mr. Lee recalled, "after a particularly discouraging day in a small farm town, I sat in a dingy hotel room thinking about where I was headed. I looked around the musty room and spied a huge piece of wallpaper hanging down from the wall. The sight was so depressing, I made up my mind then and there to get out of road sales."
WHEN he arrived back in Chicago, Fred quit his job and went to work in a store on Chicago's south side, selling men's furnishings. And while he was learning how to sell men's clothes, his brother, Benjamin, was in Lincoln, Nebr., working as advertising manager for the