is history as they say.
One job I had while following my Father’s footsteps, was “flogging” Florida swamp land all over the USA for a company called Gulf American Land Corporation (GALC). We traveled with a team of about ten guys from one small town to even smaller towns, staying at Mom and Dad and Dad and Lad roadside motels and the occasional Holiday Inn, hosting pre-arranged dinner parties. The company was owned by the Rosen brothers, Jack and Leonard. These guys had made a few bucks selling “Charles Antel Formula no. 9” which was some slimy sheep dip supposedly made with lanolin that was real snake oil. It was supposed to grow hair on a bowling ball and other wondrous things. The Rosen Bros. hired Harry Dempsy, a retired “carnie” to help flog this glop. Harry was as bald as a bowling ball and kept his hat on when flogging the sheep dip.
Harry used to sell “Hoosters Stomach Bitters” on the street corners of Chicago. He had a pet monkey wearing a bell boy suit with a little pill-box hat. Harry played music on a box with a crank handle and suckered the passing marks to buy this stuff. One day, a lady in a classy white dress kept trying to pet the monkey. Harry said, “lady d’monky don lik youse- so beat it” She persisted and finally the monkey, annoyed and frustrated, jumped on her head and took a huge crap- she screamed and sputtered- Harry said, “look lady- I tol youse, d’monkey didn lik youse!”
Harry had first been hired by the Rosen brothers, Leonard and Jack (Julius) who, after selling their parent’s delicatessen in Baltimore, had him reading the bible on a local radio station selling plastic covered tin 45 RPM records to little old ladies scrubbing the white steps of the Baltimore slums. These poor women would play the records to their loutish, drunken husbands to drive the devil out of the poor wretch.
This was a profitable scam until the United Council of Churches obtained an injunction and took him off the air. I guess this was considerably before the coming of age of the legalized televangelists or Harry would still be on - after all, the two Jewish boys from Baltimore were selling a lot of records.
Following the plastic records and Charles Antel scams, the Rosens and Harry drove down to Florida wondering what profitable activity they could find where they might be left alone for a few years. Naturally, they, as many crooks before, were attracted to swamp peddling. Florida land in the early sixtys could be found at incredibly cheap prices- especially if it was under water.
Harry followed the Rosens to Florida and thus began Gulf American Land Corporation, the only accidentally semi-honest business he and the two brothers ever had. GALC eventually became a publicly traded company and, for a time, the brothers had the Florida Real Estate Commission in their pocket. Later, after reorganization in Tallahassee, things changed, and it became more difficult for the company to continue their deceptive sales practices and eventually it faded into bankruptcy in the mid seventies. Harry, by now, well into his seventies was given a life estate by the now very rich brothers Rosen as the manager of Miami’s Monkey Jungle- which somehow seemed a particularly apt reward.
The Roving sales teams had schedules that kept us on the road for two to three weeks. We drove our own cars and were paid mileage. Each of the 10 “roving teams,” had a company van and would send the junior salesman to Baltimore every month or so to pick up supplies of maps, brochures and assorted door prizes. The company ran a “boiler room” in Baltimore where thirty gals made calls to hundreds of small towns inviting the local yokels to a “Fun night” listening to a “guest speaker” tell them about exciting real estate opportunities in Florida.
Our “Guest Speaker” was a burned out life insurance salesman named Bo Bogger, Bogger had a thing for Holiday Inn cleaning women or any other “skag” that he might find. Bo was mostly drunk, uncommunicative and Reminded me of Willie Loman, the sad sack in Arthur’ Miller’s “The Death of a Salesman.” Bo had one suit and we would dress him up, switch on the yellow spot light and introduce him as “Mr. Sunshine,” our “Guest Speaker who has flown in tonight especially to meet this wonderful crowd and tell them about the wonders of Cape Coral.”
Bo somehow always shaped up and put on an amazing performance. Afterwards, before anyone could talk to him, we took him back to his room, took off his suit, and left them there to do whatever he wanted until the next day when we packed up for another town.
How on earth can you sell someone a lot in Florida that neither you nor they have never seen? Well hang on, I’ll tell you how we accomplished this magic. After serving the not so wonderful inevitable rubber chicken and peas entree we showed a twenty minute movie and started telling our guests about Cape Coral. At each of the eight or ten tables a salesmen would spend part of his evening sizing up his dinner guests and deciding who was the most likely “fish.” By the way, most of us had never ever even seen Cape Coral.
In every town, I would try to rent a plane logging another hour or so, toward the two hundred hours needed for my commercial license. On the day that Kennedy was shot I was flying a Stinson Voyager. (photo above) I had the ADF tuned to a commercial station and heard the news. When I landed no one in the Alabama FBO seemed particularly concerned, one said, “well, I reckon it couldn’t have happened to a better guy”
They didn’t like Kennedy especially in the south, because he forced the blacks into the white schools destroying the quality of public education, especially in those areas where the Blacks outnumbered the whites and where the Black schools had not been able to provide as high a level of education as the White kids had. This mix of ignorant and backward Blacks with the more academically and socially advanced white kids brought classrooms nationwide to a slow crawl as teachers in public schools can only teach as fast as the slowest student can learn. With the white classrooms being suddenly flooded with thousands of blacks, the white kids were then and are still being academically shortchanged. Of course, in the south, hundreds of private schools sprung up overnight and all the White parents who could afford the tuition sent their kids to them.
One night, in “Defunct Springs” another sleepy southern town south of the Georgia line, we had our Cape Coral party at the local “country club”. This was on a nine hole golf course on what had once been pat of an old “southern plantation.” The Civil War in these parts, was still a fresh topic of conversation and a bunch of Yankee scalawag carpetbaggers like us were not really welcome. Still, the place needed the money and had to suck it up and get on with the shindig.
It was that time of day when the pine trees were beginning to blend into the night sky. I was at the kitchen door while the “guest Speaker’ was droning on. A wagon pulled by a real honest- to-God jackass drove up with a black family who had been invited to the dinner party. They were dressed in their “Sunday best” - the two little girls in freshly ironed dresses with ribbons in their short pigtails. The man, I would have guessed to be in his early fifties, climbed down and said- “ Sur w’all hea’ fo da Cape Co-ral diner”
Just then, the manager tapped me on the shoulder and said “ Pssst! Hey bud, ifin these darkies come in here, Im’ gonna shut off
