By Uncle Elmer
Gavin McInnes wrote a great piece about “old men” which pretty much describes my dad.
One item caught my eye: “They tell great stories. It’s not only their war stories that are a barrel of laughs. These guys have been honing their material for decades and have the whole “beginning, middle, and end” thing down to a science.”
In my recent employment essays I discuss the need for ordinary guys to learn marketing techniques, one of which is being able to tell a good story. Most of you can probably tell a good tale to your friends, but doing it in an uptight public situation can be a real challenge. It’s tough to tell a story without sounding like a braggart, which can be an instant deal-killer. Seems the ones best received are those that share a common lesson or experience.
In the book “Presentating to Win”, Jerry Weissman describes crafting a story to make a sales presentation. Technical types tend to focus on minute details of their product which often leaves the audience wondering how it solves their actual problem.
I tried the storyline approach during some recent sales meetings, and it worked! The financial players funding the project liked my simplified narrative after enduring intensive technical discussions that left them disoriented. I gave them a high-level view with guidelines for managing the project and ended up getting a much needed contract.
Ten years ago I asked my dad to write down stories of his youth. Now Dad was a moral upstanding pillar of his community, so I read with interest the following tale. Notice the format Gavin described : beginning, middle, and end. The vignette of 1930s Arizona border life is fascinating. I wonder what the kid’s dad said when he returned with the damaged car.
A Trip to the Brothel
In one’s life there are those experiences that stand out from the ordinary, some startling, some dramatic, others joyful, yet others frightening, still others coming out seemingly on the verge of engulfing you with you feeling powerless to prevent your going under. In the early summer of 1939, between my junior and senior year at Nogales High School, Jim Thomas, a friend of mine whom I had known in Naco, came down to Nogales from Tucson, in a convertible coupe driven by a friend of his. The car I believed belonged to his friend’s father.
It was early evening, and after being joined by another friend of mine, the four of us went across the border in the coupe to a beer garden where we had a pitcher of beer. Not long after we had sat at our table, Jim suggested we go to a large brothel on the outskirts of Nogales, Sonora. I had no inclination to go there at all, nor did my Nogales friend. But Jim persisted, so in the end we four piled into the coupe again and headed for the brothel. It was made up of a large dance hall and a long, single story row of rooms transverse to the hall. Inside there was an orchestra at one end and young women sitting in chairs along the sides of the hall. At the other end there was a bar. After entering, we four stood together close by. A women came up to us, and striking up a conversation in broken English with Jim, reached an agreement with him for the two of them in indulge in her trade. As they left the hall, we three got into the coupe and followed along the row of rooms to hers. We waited there after she and Jim disappeared into her room. Not very long after, seemingly only a minute or two, Jim burst from the room with his clothes on but holding his underwear in one hand and shouting, “Let’s get out of here!”. He pushed into the coupe onto my Nogales friend’s lap with me in the middle, and the other lad at the wheel.
As we started out, careering down the dirt road, the woman ran from the room shouting “Policia!”. We turned away from the dance hall on the road leading away from it. I turned my head to look behind us, and as I did I could see a policeman astride the road with his pistol in his hand taking aim at us and shouting, apparently for us to stop. Simultaneously, I saw his pistol jump twice and next heard the third of one bullet striking the convertible framework immediately above my head. I shouted at the driver to stop the car, that the policeman was firing at us with deadly intention,
Coming to a stop we waited in the car, and in what seemed like an instance a police van had come up and backed up to one side of the car with the policeman along side. We each crawled out the other side the driver’s side, and at that point I took the lead in opening up a conversation with the policeman. In an intense exchange, I somehow convinced him that we had the utmost respect for Mexican law, that we had no intention of doing harm, damaging property, or behaving with scorn or indignity against the Mexican people. I added that we would readily compensate anyone having a claim against us. The policeman apparently was mollified by my fluency in Spanish and my respectful attitude towards him, He hesitated momentarily, then said that he had knocked the heel off one of his shoes when he ran down the road from the dance hall in response to the cry, “Policia”. I took a collection from the other three, and adding my money, gave it to him. He then let us go. While we were with the policeman, a crowd had gathered. My Nogales friend was crying, and the other two were standing by seemingly in shock. As we left the scene, I felt quite good about myself having maintained my self control and kept my head, and avoided for the four what could have been a calamity. After we got back across the border. Jim and his friend left town heading for Tucson. I can’t recall our conversation as we drove back, nor what had caused the dispute between Jim and the woman or if in fact he told us.
