Who's That Knockin' At My Door
Americans sure as hell hate door-to-door salesmen. They see ‘em as an invasion of privacy who show up at the worst possible time. I’m always tempted to let the dog loose on the dweeb with the solar panel brochures.
A lot of these door knockers are high-pressure and obnoxious. But here's one good story. When I was a kid, a young guy named Neil Sheehan knocked on our front door, and my father answered it. The Sheehans lived up the road and owned a dairy farm. Neil's parents had immigrated from Ireland.
Neil was going door to door selling sets of knives to make a few bucks. My father struck up a conversation with him and learned that Neil had just graduated from Northfield Mount Hermon and was headed to Harvard in the fall. He planned to spend the summer peddling knives. My father was impressed by the young man and asked if he'd rather work for the family construction company, Daniel O'Connell's Sons. He hired him right there on the doorstep. Neil worked there every summer while attending Harvard.
Neil went on to become a reporter for The New York Times and later a Vietnam War correspondent. While at the Times, he obtained and helped expose the Pentagon Papers, earning a Pulitzer Prize. He later wrote what many consider the definitive book on the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, which earned him another Pulitzer Prize.
You never know when opportunity knocks.
My son Joe says the best door-to-door salesman joke he ever heard was told to him by the late, great Schaefer beer drinker Matt McDonough at the bar at Woodbridge’s in South Hadley. So my grandson Flynn and I teamed up to do a version of it, softening Matty's lingo just a little. Check it out below. Keep your dukes up.
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