THE BIBLE SALESMAN

I spent the summer between my junior and senior years in college working as a management trainee for a multinational corporation in Mexico City. A few days after receiving notice of my summer job, I got a phone call from someone named Randy who was a student at North Carolina State University. He was majoring in business management and he too was going to be in the management trainee program. Randy said he was going to drive down to Mexico City from his parent’s home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He offered to take me along - we’d share the driving and expenses. It sounded like a good deal and I accepted his offer. When we got to Mexico City, we ended up renting an apartment together.

During our travels and work that summer Randy and I got to know each other pretty well. I was beholding to him for his offer to share expenses. However, although he seemed like a very reasonable guy in many ways, there were some things about him that bothered me. The worst were his sleezy dealings. One night when he’d had a little too much to drink, he told me he’d spent the previous summer selling Bibles in rural Tennessee. In less than three months he made enough to pay for several years of his college education. With such a lucrative job, I wondered why he even bothered going to college.

He was on a team of college students that sold Bibles door-to-door. They arrived in a small town on a Sunday and went to the public library to look for the obituaries in the local newspapers. When the librarian wasn’t watching, they’d cut out the obituaries with razorblades. The articles had all the information they needed, such as the name and address of the deceased and the names of the next of kin. Their supervisor had a small printing press that he used to print up pages dedicated to the deceased and their kin. Then he would tip the pages into deluxe editions of Bibles with fancy spines and gilded edges.

The rural folk normally got together at Wednesday evening prayer meetings and Sunday morning church services. So, the team’s window of opportunity was between Thursday morning and Saturday evening. With Bibles in hand, they’d go to the homes of the next of kin and ask for the deceased by name. When they were told he or she had died recently, they feigned shock and said how sorry they were. Their supervisor had taught them to play-act and some of them even learned how to shed real tears when they heard the news of the deaths.

Then they’d pull out the Bible and say he or she had ordered this special edition with the dedication page in it. They continued the con game, saying that due to the special page in the Bible they would be unable to sell it to anyone else and they would have to take a total loss on it. As they began getting in their cars, the next of kin would say, wait a minute, how much does the Bible cost? The salesmen then quoted an outrageously high price, about ten times its actual value. The next of kin invariably went inside, pulled a tin can down from a shelf, and coughed up the money.

It was at the Sunday morning church services when family members began sharing their stories about the nice Bibles they’d purchased. If two or more people in the church had the same story to tell, it was then they might figure out they’d been bamboozled. But even if they reported it to the local sheriff, it was too late because the team of college students had already skipped town and was busy bilking farmers out of their life’s savings in some other part of the state.

So, Randy was quite an operator, to say the least. When he told me his story, he laughed out loud at how he’d cheated the “stupid” Tennessee farmers. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to say. I mean, the guy was a crook, and he thought what he’d done was funny. Lacking funds, I had no way to return to the United States except to ride with Randy. So, I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the summer.

On our drive back to the States Randy asked if there was a business school at the school I was attending, Georgetown University. I told him Georgetown had an excellent school of international business. Randy seemed interested. A month later I received a letter from him asking me to write a letter of recommendation for him because he’d applied to the Georgetown business school. I tore up his letter and threw it in the wastebasket. Later he called me, and I hung up on him.

It was then that I told my father about Randy and his Bible escapades in rural Tennessee. I told Dad that he seemed to be robbing the poor farmers, but I didn’t know exactly what you called such a crime. Dad had been a prosecuting attorney in Washington State, so he knew the answer to my question. He said that in legal terminology what they were doing was called fraud theft and in the State of Washington, if convicted, you could receive a sentence of up to life in prison. Dad advised me to stay as far away from Randy as possible.

About a month before I graduated from Georgetown, I happened to come face to face with Randy in front of the international business school. I was shocked – apparently he’d gotten in.

“Steve!” he said in a loud voice.

I remembered my father’s advice and said, “Excuse me, my name isn’t Steve. You must have me confused with someone else.”

“But we spent an entire summer together in Mexico City!”

“No, I don’t believe we did. You have the wrong person.”

Years later I saw the movie, Paper Moon, with Ryan and Tatum O’Neal. The movie’s plot was similar to the story my friend had told me. It made for a funny movie, but in real life it was fraud theft and it wasn’t funny at all.