Word: salesman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...electric violin that enables the player with a puny tone to boost it merely by twisting a couple of knobs on the belly. Says a salesman: "It might lay an egg; then again, it might be the hottest thing in the country." Price: about...
...Paris Review as if it were Paris Confidential. Reviewmen dashed about Paris after dark armed with gluepot and brush, illegally plastered posters on handy walls (one ended up on the lavatory ceiling of the Café du Dôme); others peddled subscriptions from door to door. One early salesman: England's waspish young man Colin (The Outsider) Wilson, who absentmindedly went off with a week's collections. Circulation reached the impressive figure (among the literary magazine set) of 7,000. But Review still lost money. In the summer of 1956 an unlikely angel came to its rescue...
...posted $400 bail, airily said Metro could "go ahead, sue, I'm broke," and went back to work. First contributors to a Norman legal-defense fund: a group of anonymous "auto salesmen" who sent $15, hoped it would help Mrs. Norman "in your problems with a certain automobile salesman...
Deceptive Words. The advance-fee racket begins, explained William Parker, a onetime "salesman" who spent 2½ years in prison, when a smooth-talking salesman finds a small property owner anxious to sell out. He ridicules his victim's low asking price, insists that his agency can get much more. After determining the prospect's wealth, he then asks an advance fee of about 1% of the newly inflated asking price, pressures the hopeful property owner into signing a contract on the spot...
...times, said Parker, the salesman cons the owner into believing his property is worth as much as $100,000, walks off with $1,000 as an advance fee. When the prospect calls in a lawyer, it just makes the game easier. "We would simply tell the lawyer he could get from 2 to 3% of the total sale price when the business was sold," explained Witness Parker. "So naturally he would approve the deal." The hooker, of course, is that the promised sale almost never comes off. The deceptively worded contract promises only that the firm will try to sell...