Prologue
I was on the basketball team at the University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh. My roommate, Shane, a baseball player, one of my great friends, saw something in me that I didn't even see in myself. He came back to the room one day and said, "Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!"
I said, "Shane. What's going on?"
He said, "Have you heard the news? "
I said, "No. What news?"
"Miller is going to hire a campus sales representative. There's already 200 people applying," he said. "That's the perfect job for you, Jeff."
I said, "You think they would even consider me? What does the job entail?"
"It's meeting people, it's connecting," he said. "You're perfect. You haven't even been here for a year and everyone loves you. You'd be great!"
I said, "Well I don't have the right clothes."
He said, "You've got those nice khaki pants and a shirt and you've got a pair of shoes, don't you?"
And I said, "Well, all I have is all tennis shoes."
"No problem," Shane said. "I'll call your mother. I'll leave Oshkosh, go down and pick up a pair of shoes at the house, and I'll come right back. We'll get you an appointment for an interview in the next day or two."
Well, sure enough, Shane kept his word, he went down and picked up the shoes, and came right back and I applied for the job. The next thing I knew I was in an interview with a guy named Bob from General Beverage and out of probably about 300 people I was selected to be the Miller High Life campus sales representative for the University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh. I started the first day of my sophomore year. It was a fabulous job. They paid me a dollar for every keg I sold whether it was a half-barrel, or a quarter barrel. I got a $50 a week base salary. And my roommates and friends on the compound could drink all the beer you can shake a stick at. There never seemed to be a cost to it. I sold a lot of beer. They couldn't believe it.
I remember one year I was invited to the Miller annual meeting and I was sitting at the table up front. The guest speaker was Al McGuire, the legendary Marquette basketball coach and broadcaster and the whole night it felt like he was talking directly to me. The men I was sitting next to were from big universities: Ohio State, Michigan State and a guy from the University of Indiana, and people were asking, "Now whereabouts are you from?" "You're in Madison right?" "You're at that big University of Wisconsin - Madison, the fifty thousand-some school?"
"No, no," I said. "We're part of the Wisconsin system but I'm in Oshkosh. We got about ten, eleven thousand students there."
"Well how can you possibly be at this table? I mean everybody at this table has got fifty to sixty thousand students." I just sat there and smiled, and then one guy, the Razorback guy, from Burford Distributing. Inc., located in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, said, "Holy crap, he must be selling a lot of beer." Well, that man got such a kick out of me that after the Miller High Life conference was over he didn't go back to Arkansas. He came up to my college and stayed for a week and boy did we go out and paint the town. He was big time, the largest Miller High Life distributorship in Arkansas. We did sell a lot of beer. It was almost hard even to imagine but most nights, Friday nights, it was 30 to 40 half-barrel kegs a night. Sometimes it was 50. On Saturdays, it was 50 to 60. Nobody could believe it and then I remember one day I went into Bob's office and said, "I think I could even do better if I had an expense allowance."
He said, "What? You're selling more beer than we can even count." He said, "Why would you even want to do that?
And I said, "Just trust me."
"What do you envision?"
"I'd like a separate check every week for $25 that I can cash and I can buy people beer so they can sample some of the Miller products when I'm out after the basketball games or on the weekend when we're not playing."
"You think that would work?" he asked.
"I think it'll work really well."
It did work but what they didn't know was this: I knew almost every bartender in every bar in Oshkosh, so many times we never even got charged for it. Our good friends, Von and Keith, Steve and on and on, Tom, Shimmy and Ziegs. They so appreciated me bringing in the football team, the baseball team, the basketball team, this team, that team, and all the people that would come along with them. Whatever we wanted to order they never charged us and that $25 was just probably a little extra for us but I did buy people beer and it really did make a difference and they noticed an improvement at the bar level shortly after that happened. The beer business was nice but it wasn't something I wanted to do for the rest of my life but I could see that by getting to know people and getting along with people and hearing what they needed, you can do pretty neat stuff with all that knowledge.
When I was a junior in college, I was still involved with Miller selling all this beer and planning all these parties and I was super connected on campus. Even while playing basketball I was also selling beer during the week and on the weekends and having a fabulous social life. I had learned the first names of 2/3 of the students on campus... I would go down on the street anywhere, going to class, to the Union, to the bars, to the dry cleaners, wherever, and I would know someone and say, "Hi Susan. Hi Colleen. Hi Dan. Hi Steve." I just had that knack to remember people's first names.
Mom and Dad had been taking my brother and me to the Dairyman's Country Club in northern Wisconsin for a number of years beginning when I was 15 or so. Fishing was our favorite activity and we just loved it there because Dave and I were big fishing guys; fishing every day, every night. It was all about fishing and eating and fishing and eating, and a little sleep, and more fishing and eating.
The Dairyman's Country Club (today just referred to as Dairyman's) was established by a group of actual Midwestern dairymen, primarily from Chicago and Milwaukee. They had purchased the property from the 1500-acre A.B. Dick estate on what was then Big Crooked Lake, now known as Home Lake, and it was well stocked with muskies and walleyes. Originally the Oliver Goff public resort, it contained woods of virgin timber and there were cabins and a dining hall, and a boathouse with fishing boats and canoes. The lakes were private and the fishing was tremendous. The beauty of Dairymen's Club was that it was a nature sanctuary, a private facility with private lakes stocked with trophy fishing and no hunting was allowed. It was actually a refuge for deer and grouse, geese and ducks and all sorts of migratory birds from all over the Western Hemisphere.
I remember one year when I was a junior in college we were staying for two weeks at Wolf Lake Lodge, which was one of Dairyman's 49 private cabins. At breakfast for several days in a row, sitting at the next table was a nice man named Roger, with his family. After the second or third breakfast Roger said, "Hey Doug. Can I talk to you for a second?"
My dad said, "Sure."
He said, "I've seen your son, Jeff, around here several times. Just seeing him now, I gotta tell you he would be absolutely perfect in the life insurance business. We've got three big hitters that are flying up here to the club late tonight and I was wondering if you would let me bring your son, Jeff, to meet them at the Home Lake Lodge. They're big time, Doug. They sell life insurance like you can't believe and they even sell life insurance to some of the astronauts. Big policies."
Dad said, "That'll be great."
Two weeks after that meeting with all those wonderful mucky mucks at Home Lake Lodge, I was recruited by Massachusetts Mutual Life and I had to take a test in Appleton, Wisconsin. I was whisked down to Appleton where I spent several hours taking a 600-question test; questions like, "When you come to an intersection and the light turns from green to yellow, what do you do?" One after another after another, those types of questions. My head hurt but I answered them all.
Less than a week later, I got a phone call from Mass Mutual Life's general agency in Appleton, Wisconsin. He said, "You scored so high on this test you are an absolute natural to sell life insurance. We haven't seen anything like it."
Starting my junior year in college, I got the call to report to duty with Mass Mutual Life. When I went up to Appleton they told me that, obviously, I'm still about 20 minutes away and as much as they would have loved for me to have an office there and work out of the Appleton area, the truth was I was in Oshkosh. I was going to school. I was working for Miller High Life but now I was going to be working for them as well. They thought it would be a great fit to work out of their district office in Oshkosh, which was run by a wonderful couple, Dennis and Patricia. The Zanowski family owned an agency in Oshkosh not too far from the Pioneer Inn, right on the bay in Oshkosh. Zanowski & Associates was a district agency for Massachusetts Mutual Life. "They report to us here in Appleton and they also have a property casualty division. You will be reporting to and working out of their office not too far from the campus." [Note: my father designed parts of the Pioneer Inn building. It was a fabulous place for 30-plus years but was eventually torn down...
