Robert A. Mills, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Robert A. Mills
MASS 12/1/2012 8:22:00 AM
The University of Georgia, winners of the SEC Eastern Division, will play the University of Alabama, winners of the Western Division, for the SEC Championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta today -- and the winner will play Notre Dame for the National Championship in Miami's Orange Bowl early in January.
I tried to get four tickets to the SEC Championship game, but the cost was prohibitive, even in the end zone nose bleed section. So, I will have to watch the game on son-in-law Phillip's 6,059 inch flat screen TV in Birmingham where we are visiting.
If UGA should win, that would have been the happiest of days, but...
The unhappiest days I can remember are the nineteen months I spent as a salesman for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. A dapper fellow (whose name I no longer recall but who assured me I was destined to become the wealthiest, most successful bloke who ever inhabited the 14th floor of Midtown Tower) talked me into it.
What is worse: I believed him.
I resigned my position as a salesman/performer at WNWZ, an all-news station where I was not only making more money than I knew what to do with, I was hosting a weekly hour long radio show where I got to interview visiting stars such as Milton Berle and Red Skelton, Racquel Welch and Katharine Hepburn, Johnny Carson and Susanne Pleshette, Robert Goulet and Sammy Davis, Jr., Hal Holbrook and Ray Charles, Studs Terkel and Jock Mahoney, Brian Donlevy and Edmund O’Brien, Steve Collins, Nelson Rockefeller and Averill Harriman et al — all with household names, while dining and drinking like a king at the finest restaurants and dinner-shows.
Also, I was given huge commissions, available new cars and unlimited gasoline for me and the family.
I left all this for an idea based on simple greed.
Billeted in a corner office with a breathtaking view, I was paid a handsome salary while studying for my underwriter’s license, an examination that I took after several weeks and passed easily with flying colors. Then all I had to do was sell life insurance policies to friends and relatives who could not resist me. I would soon be on my way to fame and fortune.
There was only one catch. No one told me that life insurance was a product nobody wanted to buy.
But such was the case. What no one considered is that all my friends, relatives and contacts were, like me, going to live forever and did not need life insurance. Plus, it is a fact that no one buys life insurance unless they truly love somebody — and I was the only romantic in the world.
So, in nineteen months I sold only one policy, and that was to myself on the life of my wife (a lass 15 years younger than me and worth a $30,000 whole life policy, which cost about $30 a month.)
“What a bargain!” I was told. “And you only have to pay for it maybe ten years, then the dividends and paid-up insurance will take care of her premiums forever!”
What a deal! Where do I sign?
Of course, that was all baloney, a ton of smoke. But I bought the policy, anyway, and I kept at the insurance dodge for nineteen frustrating months. It was only a short time (while the ink was still wet in my license) before I realized I had confronted every friend, relative and contact about buying life insurance, and I had been graciously but emphatically told to get lost. Go to hell, was the operative phrase.
I went instead to the General Agent, a most affable and understanding chap named Hank, and told him it just was not working out. He told me to “hang in there” and give it a while longer —“And do not worry your head none,” he said, “about what I am payin you. You never have to pay it back, even agin eventual commissions. It is yours to keep, boy! Take as long as you need. You all are doin a great job!”
He had more faith in me than I had in myself. I stayed with it through most of 1978, but even though I had become fast friends with Don Sproule and other agents, I finally threw in the towel.
The catalyst, the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was a conversation I had one day in the elevator with Ed Musicus, my old boss at WNWZ.
“If you had you stuck it out with me at ‘Z’,” he said, “we would have bought the station together when Dan left, and when we finally dumped the place, you would be as rich as me by now. I always figured you and me would wind up partners someday — if you had just stayed away from the 14th floor and those insurance bozos!”
I resigned from Mass Mutual shortly after that and became a Mad Man, opening my own radio/TV ad agency with a handful of clients from my halcyon days in broadcasting. That venture grew and grew, turning into a bonanza that kept me in Cadillacs and swimming pools for several years.
Of course, I continued to dabble in travel and tourism, as well as advertising, and that soon brought on the saga of Roger Manheim, Jeff Resnick, Pat Cortese, Ray Ruby, Sandy Byers, Jackie Laney, A.J. Nassar and Dick Kaplan.
But that’s another whole story for another whole column. Or two . . . Maybe three or four.
