Ward Poag - Why I got into the Car Business

WHY I GOT IN THE CAR BUSINESS


When people ask me, why I got in the car business, I usually tell
them, "Because I spent just enough time on the farm, to find out I
didn't want to work for a living!"

In that statement there is more truth than poetry. But, as a matter of
fact I did spend my early years and most of my summer "vacations" on
farms, so
far out in the boondocks of Middle Tennessee, we'd have had
to wait til Tuesday night to get the Grand Ol' Opry Saturday
night broadcast. That is, if we'd 've had a radio!
This was in the late '20s and early '30s, during the Great
Depression. There were three farms. Two were located in Center,
Tennessee. Center was a crossroads community in Lawrence County, where
my mother and father taught in a two
room schoolhouse. In addition to the schoolhouse, there was a general
store and a grist mill, where they turned corn into cornmeal.
The other farm was three miles from Hohenwald on state
route 20 in Lewis County, Tennessee.

IT WAS HARD WORK
Those farms were 19th century vintage. Plowing, planting, sowing,
and reaping were done with horses mules, or by hand. For instance,
"chopping cotton" was using a hoe to dig weeds out of the cotton rows,
and corn was handpicked and shucked. Potatoes were dug out of the
ground by hand.
The worst job, by far, was "breaking new ground". This
was clearing and plowing up land, which had never been farmed before,
and the problem was tree stumps and roots.
A big tree was a bitch! To get the stump out, we had to cut all
the roots, and use long poles as pry bars, under the stump, then hook
up a pair of horses and mules with trace
chains and try to pull it out. Most of the time that worked, but not
always. Sometimes, the stump had to be burned out, and that could take
several weeks or months. And, sometimes
the stump was left in the ground to be plowed around. But, that was
just the beginning of the problem.
We'd hook up a horse or mule to a hand plow, and use them to break
ground. A big problem was using the reins to control the animal, and
that was usually a full time job
with a mule. At the same time, we had to grip both handles of the plow
to steer it in a straight line.
A bigger problem on newground was the roots, some of which, were
several inches thick, and we had no way to get them out of the ground.
It would take at least a year for them to rot out, and until they did,
they constituted a major hazard.
When we started to break newground, we might have an idea where
the roots were, and try to avoid them, but that didn't always work
out. Once in a while, you'd be turning a furrow, and the plow blade
would hit a root, and jerk the plow out of your hands, and one of the
handles would stab you in the belly and tickle your backbone. To say
the least, it was a breathtaking experience.
If you want to learn how to "cuss", I'd recommend plowing
newground with a balky mule. If you don't know any
curse words, you'll make some up!

Water came from a well or cistern. If you wanted to take a bath,
it was the creek, if you had one nearby, or a wash tub.

Light was provided by coal oil (kerosene) lamps. Cooking was on a
wood stove. Heat was provided by a pot bellied wood stove or
fireplace. One of my chores was to chop kindling for the stoves.
The women made some clothes from flour sacks. They made their own
soap from lye, "hawgfat" (lard), and ashes in a
great big ol' iron kettle.

The houses were "four rooms and a path". The path was to
a standard two-hole outhouse, equipped with a Sears Roebuck
catalogue. No. We didn't use the catalogue pages for toilet
paper. The pages were too thin and slick. What we used the catalogue
for was for wishing. You could thumb through the pages and pick out
items you'd like to have sometime or other.

Our main contact with the outside world was a day old
newspaper from Nashville. I know of only one radio anywhere close to
any of the three farms. The only time I saw it was in 1936, when my
cousin and I walked a mile or so up a dirt road to listen to the Joe
Louis - Jim Braddock fight. I was nine years old at the time.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is, that I saw enough of farm
life's toil, trouble and drudgery to develop
a healthy aversion to routine jobs and hard physical labor !
Farm life was a redundant routine of laborious toil. There was an
old saw about it in those days: "Man works from
sun to sun, and woman's work is never done."
The reason farm people "went to bed with the chickens" was, they
were so damned tired, they needed all the rest they could get.

"IT AIN'T LIKE WORK"
After I'd been in the business of selling cars and trucks for a
while, someone asked me how I liked the car business, and I told
them, "It ain't like work. I love it!"
Most people, who are good at selling cars and trucks, feel the same
way.

Jim Shade was a plant supervisor before I hired him as a salesman
for Don Jacobs Oldsmobile, in Lexington, Kentucky.
This was in 1971, and after he'd been selling cars for several months,
he was offered a job which would pay him $18,000 a year, when the
average was $10,000.
When Jim refused the job, man who offered the job asked
Jim, "Do you mean you'd rather sell cars than be a plant manager for
me?"
Jim replied, "I like it so much, that if they didn't pay me, I'd
pay them to let me do it!"
That just about sums it up. The car business is fun for
people who are good at it. It is a job which is never routine. You
know what you are going to do every day, but what you don't know is
how it's going to turn out. You don't
know what new and interesting people you're going to meet. And, you
don't know what interesting or challenging situation will arise.
Primarily the car business is interesting and entertaining,
because it is a people business, and you never
really know what they are going to do, or how they will act
and react. You meet all kinds of people, fom all walks of life, and no
two people behave in exactly the same manner. So, there is a challenge
every time you deal with or meet new people, especially prospective
buyers.

The challenge is to help them do something they want to do - buy a
car or truck - but are reluctant to do for any one of several reasons.
If you love dealing with people, and can sell, you would love the
automobile business.