Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Teddy bears kid stuff? Not so, says Peter Bull in his book, Bear with Me, published in England. Give a Teddy to an impressionable child, and the bear has a place in the child's effects and affections for life. Bull, a character actor whose own family of Teddies numbers 14, presents ample and arresting testimony to the fact that he is no oddity but merely one of thousands of thoroughly grown-up people, all dedicated "arctophilists"-friends of the bear...
...told him that he was an idiot. His first employer told him that he was stupid. His mother-in-law told him that her daughter should have married a doctor. He lost his previous job. Nobody loves him. He doesn't know where he's going in life and wouldn't give you two cents for his future...
...born loser? Not if he becomes a salesman for Pennsylvania Life Insurance Co., whose president cites this as the résumé of an ideal prospective employee. Penn Life offers such men an income that fairly often exceeds $20,000 and a smothering of somewhat unusual fringe benefits. According to President Stanley Beyer, 36: "We become the teacher who loved him, the mother-in-law who thinks he is great, the coach who gave him nine letters, the boss who wants to make him president...
Beyer's pop psych is apparently remarkably effective. Pennsylvania Life Insurance has been spectacularly successful. Since 1960, it has increased its assets by 800%, to $48 million in 1968, and its life insurance in force by 11,600%. In 1968, its "gains from operations," the insurance industry's rough equivalent of profits, were $4,000,000. An investment of $13.50 in the company's stock five years ago is worth $242 today...
Despite its name, Pennsylvania Life Insurance is based in Los Angeles. It concentrates on selling disability income insurance, which its 1,850 salesmen peddle with missionary fervor to self-employed merchants, farmers and smalltown businessmen. The salesmen are not required to be creative, but merely to read a 25-minute presentation prepared by the company. Management's philosophy is that anybody who can read can sell. Success is founded on making plenty of presentations; salesmen make as many as a dozen brief calls for each prospect who is willing to listen to a presentation. But Penn Life has calculated...