Employed 14 part 1

Officially, Lil was the last person of our Bascom Avenue contingent, as she called us, to leave 983 So. Bascom Avenue. I thought Thom would re-staff the Bascom Ave. location and buy some ads, but as the weeks after the close rolled by, no new staffing or other signs of business life were to appear there. A couple of months later, I noticed a used radio and TV store open for business at that address.
I missed being with Lil and the salesman and realized it would be forever before I found myself in such good company at work. But it was good to be involved in a kind of work completely new to me.
We bought a 2 1/2 ton refrigerated container truck. We took it to Sanger, Ca. and loaded it with 300
boxes of fancy grade Sunkist oranges sizes 118 and 88. We had sold the last of them before noon
Sunday, that first weekend. During the following week we hauled three loads  @ 300 boxes each of
choice grade oranges, which we put in the large, cool garage of our Eichler on Goodwyn Ave. We began our produce business in the same week (early July 1963) that our daughter Sarah was born. What a neat kid. Early on she was so aware of her surroundings and so likely to be moved to laughter. Her big sister Reyann, three at the time, became her favorite. They spent a lot of time together and enjoyed each other greatly. I was so pleased with the family that Dahlia and I had made.
The first day that we tailgated at the Skyline Blvd. wide spot  as an actual business, there were three other tailgaters who set up shop.  At sundown on Sunday we still had about a quarter of our second load of the weekend unsold. Not a very good omen. Aware of how well Roger and Hazel's fruitstand on Bascom Ave. did, we thought it might be a good idea to look for a location where we might operate such a stand. At the South edge of Mission SanJose ,about 12 miles north of San Jose city, we found just such a place. Open and airey, with plenty of display bins and a full roof. It only needed to be stocked and connected to electricity.It was about thirty miles from the fruitstand in Mission San Jose (FSM) to the Oakland wholesale produce market. Roger was a regular buyer there and invited me to accompany him there to observe how he conducted himself as a wholesale produce buyer. I was struck by how much Roger was like my stepdad,Eli, when doing his main work. Actually their main work. You buy stuff.Then you sell that same stuff after adding a nice mark-up.When it's done skillfully and with integrity, a good time can be had by all involved.From my perspective,Eli and Roger both had a great time at work. Most of the time. Most of the time they and their prospects were obviously having a good time.Much of the time they could be found laughing. Watching Roger at the Oakland Market had me laughing most of the time. The more I saw, the more I thought "I can do this work". And I did.I got along with the guys at the market just fine. I was kind of a half-assed comic there from 4AM to breakfast two or three mornings a week while we operated the fruitstand at Mission San Jose. Which was not what I would call an extended period. our quick thinking (and poor managing)convinced us to close that place in our second month there. During our last week there,Dahlia covered the closing of the fruitstand while l carried (aboard our reefer truck) three loads of oranges from Sanger to super-markets in Reno, Lovelock, Winnemucca, and Elko. Pretty good produce-peddling,Huh? It was in that month that I met Ed Dursee, manager of the Steven's Creek Blvd. office of the California Pacific Finance company. We were to have a long and active business reelationship. At first he put up the money to get the duece-and-a-half back on the road after it ate a clutch and chased it with the contents of the cooling system,leaving the engine unworkable. Ed's help quickly fixed the truck, but we sold it just as soon as it was fixed, to a couple of business men who took the truck to Costa Rica where they planned to haul fish. Using money from the sale of the truck and that which Ed advanced me I bought a little larger truck with a V-8 engine that I thought I'd use it to do some tailgating as well as trips to Nevada. The newer truck, though without refrigeration could carry more weight in less time and the insulated box that I built on it held the temp of the load very well to destinations as far away as Salt Lake City, though I never made it that far east; I usually had sold the load before reaching Wells. We were beginning to feel the effects of my losing the job at Cal-Lum. The produce business can be a bitch. The bigger, faster, newer truck that Cal Pac finance and I bought, broke down with a load of bell peppers aboard, 500 miles from their buyer. By the time the truck was fixed,I had managed to sell a few hundred pounds of the peppers to the produce mgr.at a nearby Ralph's Market, who, fortunately had brought his pickup to work that day, which made it possible for him to haul the peppers to Ralph's,about a half-mile away. Once the truck was running again,I went to the local waste area and paid most of my cash-at-hand to dump the rotten peppers. While I was trying to "make a killing" with a load of peppers, Dahlia was selling our beautiful Eichler to her parents.(She always did have a better understanding of our assets, liabilities and etc. She said the house was our only chance to recover financially. we rented a 3-Bdrm townhouse in North East SanJose. I removed the insulated box from the truck and with Roger's permission left it in the back yard of his fruitstand. I hope he made good use of it because I completely spaced it and never returned to dispose of it. My excuse is that I had my hands full, keeping my head above water. For a string of months , I went from one stupid sales job to another and another.One day I found myself at work in a Firestorm store, standing around waiting for a customer, mostly thinking about all the failures in attempts to get back in the stream. To make serious bucks like Cal-Lum had produced. My thoughts came up with Thom Kessler. I'll bet he's not suffering for lack of a high income. I wondered again why Cal-Lum hadn't opened a new San Jose store.Some weeks earlier when I was working at Commercial Carpet Outlet I encountered Russ Eames, one of the salesmen who had worked at Cal- Lum .He said he had heard that Cal-Lum was looking for a property in San Jose.I wasn't surprised.and while it wasn't going to do me any good,I was pleased to hear it. I left Firestorm at about 1PM and went home for lunch.Driving home I was thinking of some of the jobs I had done since Cal-Lum:Of course the produce business was first, followed by a few weeks as a Fouler Brush Man,Salesman for a distributor of draperies,Then sales of China and Silver place-settings, then kitchen cutlery. I even spent a couple of months selling a best-known brand of encyclopedia of worldly knowledge. It was while I worked for Commercial Carpets that one of the biggest news stories of the decade took place.I had a mid-day appointment in Los Gatos. When I arrrived there and knocked on the door,there was some delay before an answer.The lady that cameto the door was crying. She showed me to the rumpus room where she and her husband were watching TV.Walter Cronkite said that the president had been shot at Dealley Plaza in Dallas.The next thing he said was that President Kennedy had been pronounced dead. None of us was interested, right then, to be involved in a pitch for a new carpet.I excused myself and said I'd be in touch to make a new appointment in a few days. I got so caught up with the recent past jobs as I drove home from Firestorm that I nearly missed my exit. As I approached our townhouse, I noticed a black, new, (64) Olds 98, parked in our driveway. Thom Kessler?!!! Hey Thom, what are you doing in this neighborhood? "Just slummin',What are you doing here?" "I'm waiting for the next bus out, but I don't think it's been scheduled yet. "Can we go inside,I think I might be able to offer some suggestions, where is your brother Irvin?" "Last I heard, he was in Nashville".