1976.4.23
Greeley, Colorado -- the only town that smells like a feed store.
Basil and I came back to Denver this morning after completing the last day of competition, which for us lasted two days and one sleepless night. It began on the 19th, when Basil and I got a bus to Cheyenne, but we didn't do so good as the place had been fundraised so much. So we went to Laramie, but that was even worse. The church has a center there next to UW campus and most of the townspeople knew us and were generally negative. So we left town the same day and came to Greeley.
But we still didn't do so well as Greeley has also been fundraised a lot recently. Still, the next day, the 21st, we got an early start after Captain Yasuda called us and said we must each make $250 or don't come back. By 9 o'clock that night Basil had just over $100 and I had about $150. I called the center and Kate said we had to fulfill, and as long as we didn't go to sleep, even if it took three days, it would still count as one day.
So Basil and I determined that we would do it. We went out blitzing, but we made very little and spent the night in Sambo's drinking coffee. We tried to fundraise the place, but the manager wouldn't let us and there was nothing open, so we just stayed there and took turns bringing our product from the shopping center into town.
We decided to go to Loveland, but then we found out there was no bus to Loveland, so we finally decided to get a rental car. We finally made our goal by 8 o'clock last night and then drove back to Greeley and spent the night at the apartment of a couple of sisters who are pioneering and whom we had met while they were witnessing in a bar the night before. Cathy and Jan gave us dinner and at 10 o'clock we listened to an interview on the radio that Cathy did to refute the allegations of brainwashing and to counter the false information about the church and Father.
We arrived back in Denver to find Mr. Hayashi and his wife had come for a visit for a couple days. They brought us a new van, and tomorrow Mr. Hayashi will give us a report on the world situation.
Turn the page: The Door
The fundraising styles of the Oakland family and The Rest Of The Church differed. In the Oakland family, when they took you fundraising, you'd typically be dropped off for a run of a few hours - 2 to 3 hours in a big metropolitan area, 4 to 6 in more rural or suburban areas, depending on how long it would take your captain to get back to you after dropping off the last slave, er, brother or sister. The main feature of this style was that you never spent that much time away from your brothers and sisters, and if you needed pumping up after your time in the fallen world, you got it. The Oakland church was very protective of its members.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, in The Rest Of The Church, you might be dropped off for an entire day, and be tasked with hitchhiking or somehow getting transportation from one town to several others. Good sellers were dropped off with a stack of product as tall as themselves, which they would then have to stash somewhere. Somehow I never had that problem.
You might be picked up at 8pm after being out on the street since 9am. In the van, you would count out your money, get yelled at for not making enough, and be given a bucket of flowers for a "bar run". You'd do that from 9 to midnight or 1, depending on what day of the week it was, and then get picked up, get yelled at some more, and go home (to the regional center or a motel room) to catch 4 or 5 hours of sleep. Once, our team didn't make enough money, and we were dropped off on the highway to walk the last 5 miles home at 1am.
As I may have mentioned, I was absolutely terrible at fundraising. I think the most I ever made in a day was $225. I began to develop an attitude, the kind of an attitude that only repeated failure can create. For my own mental health, I was forced to justify any way I could *feel good* during the day.
Sometimes I would self-medicate. This would result later, when I was stationed with CARP in Madison, Wisc. (at the "bad members" center), in a practice of having a couple of glasses of wine at one Madison's many fine local bars, then selling door to door and talking like a sit-com, meanwhile narrating my own progress between houses in Howard Cosell's voice. Weird, I know. It was a survival tactic. If I could make myself laugh, I'd be OK.
In an attempt to fundraise creatively in Texas, one Saturday night I hitched rides with the kids who were cruising up and down the main drag. We smoked dope and attempted to get their friends in other cars to buy flowers. I think I made about $9 that way. But I also didn't go crazy for one more day!
Another time I was in a beautiful little town, maybe somewhere in Pennsylvania, in the dead of winter. I think it was Christmas eve. This town reminded me of Willoughby, from The Twilight Zone; it was just the most perfect little town, with a town square, City Hall, and a classic old theater, where they were having a special showing of Pippi Longstocking.
I must have been in a rare state of mind. I started my evening by having a couple of pints of beer at a bar, then went and watched the movie. Not surprisingly, I don't remember who my team captain was or even what part of the church I was stationed in at that time. I choose to take that as a good sign, one of healthy self-esteem. By that point, it obviously didn't matter to me how badly I did fundraising.
This had me laughing from start to finish. Classic!
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