|
Mitch Chase
The Flying Fuller Brush Man Takes Off
(From The Decatur Daily, Tuesday, November 16, 2004)
There wasn't much left of him in the end, suffering, as he was, from leukemia, a broken hip, and circulation problems that turned his feet a gangrenous black. He was down to 102 pounds on a 5-foot-7 frame, "all bone," his widow relates.
But it was the Marsa infection, an incurable antibiotic-resistant "hospital disease," that really spelled his doom. During his last agonizing and delirious weeks in a California health-care facility, visitors to his bedside were required to cover themselves in hospital gowns, masks and gloves — not for his protection, but for their own.
It was shortly after one of these visits by his wife, her children and a beloved grandchild, that my father, Cliff Chase, died in his sleep. He was 79.
It happened early Saturday morning in Orange, Calif. A few hours later his body was cremated, the ashes scheduled for eventual dispersal at sea. There will be no funeral services — he desired none to spare family and friends the costs and inconveniences of long-distance travel.
It was a quiet ending for a man who was once a minor celebrity in the 20th century's booming direct-sales industry. My father was "The Flying Fuller Brush Man."
Fuller Brush Co., founded in 1906, employed door-to-door salesmen around the country to market its extensive line of personal grooming and home maintenance products, including a wide variety of quality brushes of every sort.
It was the premier company in the door-to-door field, so much so that many of the venerable traveling salesman jokes were recast as "Fuller Brush Man" jokes, a fact not lost to Hollywood. In 1948, Columbia Pictures produced the comedy "The Fuller Brush Man" with Red Skelton in the title role.
Starting out as a door-to-door "drummer" for Fuller Brush after World War II, my father became a field manager for the firm, acquiring a territory of 19 Northeast Nebraska counties covering nearly 13,000 square miles, the farthest point more than 300 miles from our home in Omaha.
Frequently, Dad drove more than 500 miles a day, and in his first two years in the job, he related in a 1959 magazine article, he "wore out two cars with 80,000 miles of
driving, half of it on gravel roads."
He wasn't home a lot, either, until he took flying lessons from a former 1920s barnstormer, got his pilot's license and purchased a 1946 Luscombe 8A, a two-seat, all-metal, high-wing monoplane.
He immediately put it to use in covering his territory — with mixed results. "Airports were originally a problem," he recalled. "It seemed that half of the time my destination had none." So he began experimenting with landings and takeoffs in farm fields in the Nebraska flatlands, ignoring "hangar stories of outraged farmers."
He landed in "scores of mown alfalfa fields, hay fields and pastures," in the process making friends "with a great number of farmers."
"I've been given rides to town, invitations to meals, and sold brushes by the hundreds to these friendly farm business men, with nary a gripe or complaint. There have even been one or two small town newspaper accounts of my landings," he wrote in an article published in the May 1959 issue of Flying magazine after he had traded in the Luscombe for a larger, four-seat Cessna 170.
The article, aptly titled "Flying Fuller Brush Man," detailed his Fuller Brush flying career and gave numerous tips for off-airport landings. (An example: "Tie your plane down securely. Farmers are more concerned about something happening to your aircraft than they are about the use of their field as a runway.")
He made it sound easy, and fun, but the editors of Flying still included a cautionary note in the article to stress the dangers of such off-airport exploits.
Dad was enormously successful in developing his territory, the success itself causing his downfall as "The Flying Fuller Brush Man." He used some of his increased earnings to set up coin-operated laundries in Omaha. While repairing a washer alone in 1962, he gouged his right eye with a pair of needle-nose pliers.
Despite a cornea transplant, he never regained sight in the eye and never piloted a plane again. For the rest of his life, he wore an eye patch, which gave him a somewhat rakish look.
Not long after the accident, he left Fuller Brush for a series of other, less lucrative sales jobs, eventually finding a second career as an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service. He was proud of that job and the fact that he helped recover millions of dollars for the government from tax cheats.
By that time, I wasn't seeing much of him. After 20 years of marriage, he divorced my mother, the former Corlys McLeod of Echo, Minn., and went to California to start a new life with another woman. This caused me considerable distress, but the marriage didn't last long, and we were reconciled before his fourth and final marriage, to the former Coreen Bowling of Lexington, Ky.
He spent the last 18 years of his life married to Coreen, a former model and champion bowler.
For the record
Clifford E. Chase Jr., who died Nov. 13, 2004, in Orange, Calif., was born May 26, 1925, in Minneapolis, Minn., the son of Clifford E. Chase Sr., an advertising executive, and the former Myrtle Eck, who later founded a nationally known mail-order firm, "Mrs. Helm's Dresden Crafts."
A 1943 graduate of Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, Chase served stateside in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, most notably at Moody Field near Valdosta, Ga., and was one of a select group of servicemen to qualify as expert with the M-1 carbine. He attended the University of Nebraska and earned a degree in advertising from the University of Minnesota.
Survivors include his wife, Coreen Chase, of Orange, Calif.; a brother, Clyde Chase, of Minneapolis; three sisters, Jeanne Crandall, Virginia Sanderson and Dolores Peterson, all of Minneapolis; three sons, Steve Chase of Lancaster, Calif., Mitch Chase of Decatur and Tom Chase of Birmingham; two daughters-in-law, Judy Chase of Lancaster, Calif., and Maritza Chase of Decatur; four stepchildren, Steve Williams, Mike Williams and Sue Tompkins, all of California, and Kenny Smiley of Ohio; two grandchildren, Roy Chase and Dixie Chase of Decatur; and 10 step-grandchildren.
He also would have wanted his late stepfather, Roy E. Helm of Minneapolis, to be remembered in this space.
Funeral arrangements were handled by the Neptune Society.
Adolescent Adventures
With Lasers (From The Decatur Daily, Thursday, January 25, 2005)
The rash of recent laser shinings into the cockpits of commercial airliners got me digging out my laser level from my chest of drawers.
Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta maintains that "lasers are not toys," but I know better. That's why I keep my laser level tucked under my underwear — I don't want my 13-year-old son playing with it. He might break it.
Although I purchased the laser just a couple of years ago, I'd wanted one since I was a child.
Back in the early 1960s, lasers were one of the neatest things around — space-age technology right up there with Sputnik and the Mercury capsule. They could do all kinds of neat things, including cut solid steel like it was butter. Nifty!
My brother Steve, four years older than me, was fascinated by them, which wasn't unusual, since he was fascinated by all things electrical. I always figured he'd be some kind of scientist when he grew up, and my parents encouraged him in that direction with an electric Lionel train, an Erector Set, a Testors chemistry set and assorted electrical paraphernalia, including switches, light connections, alligator clips, rolls of wire and large dry-cell batteries.
I only vaguely remember what was probably his first project — a crystal radio — but as he grew older his experiments grew more complicated, and interesting. A telegraph set on a plywood board, for example, gave way to a set of telephones. On another occasion, he constructed an electromagnet with impressive pulling power. He also experimented with electro-plating, using household chemicals and those trusty dry cells. Magically, he transformed a steel wartime penny into a shiny copper-clad cent. "If it were really copper," I remember him solemnly telling me, "it would be worth thousands of dollars." (Steve was a coin collector, too.)
I asked how you could tell it wasn't copper.
"Simple," he replied, pulling out a magnet and demonstrating to me that although copper pennies weren't magnetic, steel ones were — even those coated with copper.
Complicated things were often simple to Steve, so I got excited the day he announced that one of his high school friends had plans for a laser — and they were going to make one.
Visions of cutting up chunks of steel with beams of green-colored light raced through my head, until Steve told me it wouldn't be that powerful. Still, we might be able to melt a few plastic "army men."
The next day, though, my dreams of laser-fried toy soldiers were dashed. Steve learned that the plans called for a platinum rod — something far too expensive for us to acquire. We were both disappointed
A couple of days later, however, the laser plan was on again. One of Steve's teachers had told him that he could substitute a carbon rod for the platinum one. Where would we get one? "Simple," he replied. We'd use the carbon pole in the middle of one of the dry-cells batteries.
Steve got out an old 9-volt and went to work on it. In no time he had a black mess of powder on his desk — and an impressive looking stick of carbon in his hand.
It looked like we were in business, but we really weren't. Some other difficulties arose that were too difficult to surmount for even someone like Steve, who had a subscription to Popular Science magazine.
Steve went on to other things, eventually becoming an electrical engineer for the U.S. Air Force based at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where he's involved in work that he's not supposed to talk about.
Certainly, he could put together a laser now if he wanted, but perhaps it's best that he doesn't.
The temptation with all those Air Force planes around might prove to be too much for him.
I'm not saying he'd be shining cockpits, but I do remember when he got his Daisy BB gun.
He wasn't supposed to shoot it at birds, either.
Try telling that to that poor dead sparrow.
___________________________________________________________________________
|
|