The Insurace Man
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
On that first day when we moved to a small country church in the small country town of Ararat, in Western Victoria, the heat was unbearable. For days it had been over a century fahrenheit and everything was dry and dusty. The front of the manse and the church was fenced with 180 feet of rusty corrugated iron. I decided on that first day that I would paint the fence. I had enquired up at the hardware store and found out it was best to rub rust off with a wire brush and then give it a coat of zinc chromate before the undercoats. What the man in the shop did not explain to me was that my three four gallon tins of zinc chromate were bright yellow. By the time I had rubbed the rust off the fence and started on the zinc chromate it stood out like a sore thumb.
I was wearing only a pair of shorts and was sweating all over. I did not even have a hat to keep the sun off. All of our clothing and possessions had gone to the United States of America in the SS Arcadia while we had been held up because our American visas had been lost in the turmoil surrounding the assassination just recently of President John F. Kennedy.
Now taking this brief fill in ministry in the country town I was wanting to show the people when they discovered the next Sunday that I had arrived, that I wanted to leave a permanent mark on their church. I was doing it with zinc chromate.
I was scrubbing down another yard or so of the rusty corrugated iron when a flashy Chrysler car pulled up. It was one of those cars that were around in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s with huge tail fins and lots of tail lights. A bouncy and breezy man hopped out of the car and walked over to me and stuck out a hand in friendship. He was not like the slow moving country types that I had encountered in the general store. He was full of energy and enthusiasm. “Harry Reilly is my name, and insurance is my game,” he said as he put into my hand a card. I read the card:
Harry Reilly,
AMP Representative
Ararat District
Telephone 9 2211.
I said to him, “G’day, Mr. Reilly. I am pleased to meet you but I want to tell you right now that I don’t want to buy any insurance.” He looked me in the eye and laughed and said, “Well I want to tell you I’m not even selling you any insurance. I am not here to sell you anything at all.”
I thought to myself, “You liar. All insurance men are trying to sell you all the time and this is one man from whom I am not going to buy anything. I’ll let him see that I am determined not to buy any insurance.”
He looked at me again, “I just saw that you had shifted in today and that you are already starting to paint the fence so I thought I would welcome you to the district. It is not often you see a man painting the fence on his first day so you must be some good sort of a fellow.”
“Well I welcome you to a great city and a good church. You have got wonderful prospects here and I know you are going to find this ministry the best you have ever had.”
I looked at him again and thought, “You liar. This is not a great town. It is a dusty, dirty, noisy, run down country town that is only kept alive because it is the railway centre for the wheat industry and because it has got a couple of big government institutions that employ most of the people. And it is not a good church at all. It is a run down, argumentative, divided church and this is the most derelict looking property I have ever seen for the worship of God. And as far as its being my greatest ministry to date, I intend to stay here only a few weeks until my visas come through and we can head off to America to do my doctorate studies.”
I did not tell Harry what I was thinking and it is just as well.
He spoke again, “No, I am not selling anything. As a matter of fact I want to give you something. To welcome you into the town and your new church I want to give you a calendar for the New Year.” And with that he produced with a flourish a cardboard cylinder. I put my paint brush down and the wire scrubbing brush, brushed my hands on my shorts, and opened the end of the cardboard cylinder and took from it the calendar. It was one of those large calendars they used to print each year with a beautiful picture of Australian bush and underneath it the twelve squares containing each day of the year in their monthly order. Across the middle it had ‘Harry Reilly, AMP Representative, ‘Phone Ararat 9 2211’. I rolled up the calendar and put it back into the cardboard cylinder.
“Thanks Mr. Reilly, but I may not hang it up. I don’t like calendars hanging on the wall.” Mr. Reilly beamed. “And neither do I. I don’t want you to hang this up in your house because I think you should have only quality pictures in your house. Go down to the outhouse at the back of your yard and behind the dunny door you will find a nail, hang it there.”
He laughed and I laughed. We shook hands and he left.
But I did not realize what an artful insurance man I had.
It was about time I had a cool drink so I left the wire brush and the yellow zinc chromate paint and went inside where my wife was trying to coax the most battered old “Silent Knight” refrigerator you have ever seen into producing something lower than room temperature. I showed her the calendar and told her about Mr. Reilly and then put the cylinder upon the mantelpiece in our almost empty lounge room. The over stuffed lounge and two chairs which someone had for a long time out in their garage before the church secretary had revived it for our use, was so full of dust that the whole room seemed to be dusty.
Over the next week we finished rubbing off all the rust on the corrugated iron fence and painted over the dull battleship grey with the brilliant yellow zinc chromate. I had also wire brushed down the front doors of the church and painted them pillar box red. That Sunday morning, the first of my interim ministry, had church members standing outside in little knots of people shaking their heads at this disastrous colour scheme.
About a week later, we borrowed a vacuum cleaner and were cleaning the old couch and two chairs in the lounge room when I came across the cardboard cylinder bearing the calendar on the mantelpiece. My aversion to having calendars up on the wall was such that even though we had no pictures in the lounge room I still wasn’t going to hang that AMP calendar. I was about to throw it into the rubbish tin, except we didn’t even own a rubbish tin, when I remembered what Harry Reilly said: “Go down to the outhouse at the back of your yard and behind the dunny door you will find a nail, hang it there.”
So I decided to do that.
I walked the grassy trek down to the outhouse which was in even worse condition than the rest of the property, and sure enough inside there were two nails.
To the right hand side of the toilet seat there was one nail in the old dunny wall. It had a piece of string on it which was threaded through a whole lot of pieces of “The Weekly Times” The Victorian Country Farmers Magazine”. I was going to be initiated into many articles on those quarter pages of “The Weekly Times” throughout my time. There were advertisements for Sunlight Soap and for tea: “Every cook praises his own stew and all who know what good tea really is praise ‘Myfa’ tea as the best. Once tried always used.”
There were also advertisements for Dr. Waugh’s baking powder which was always the best, and Gee’s complete fertilizers and natural manures for farm, orchard and garden.
Each quarter page of “The Weekly Times” would have some interesting article on “How to deal with fungus and insect pests”, or “Salty milk”.
Sometimes my knowledge was stretched with articles on “growing rhubarb in the home garden” and “Beans from Madagascar”.
One of the problems was that inevitably the torn quarter page cut the article off at an interesting point. You would be reading that Mr. McAlpine, the government vegetable pathologist of Victoria, indicated how molasses in bordeaux spray …......... when all of a sudden the article ended just as you are about to pour the treacle coloured liquid into another vessel.
Or you would be reading the sensational statement from London received by wire lately that “over 100,000 pounds per annum is lost through steer hides being mutilated by not being cut correctly.” It would then point out that because hides were incorrectly cut by butchers, farmers and trappers, large amounts of hide were wasted in the tanneries. There would be other occasions when I would read about the problem of liver fluke, or tapeworms in sheep. Any particular article would arouse interest and then lead to a searching through the other pieces of quarter pages to see if you could find the rest of the article. To this day I can discuss intelligently the problems of home grown rhubarb, salty milk, and liver fluke. However, I am always at a loss to know what to do about them because that was on the missing page.
The second nail in that old country dunny was behind the door. Just where Mr. Reilly said it would be. I hung the calendar on the nail behind the door and left.
Now I am, by nature, a fairly regular sort of person. Twice at day at least, sometimes three times, I would sit there with the door ajar just enough to allow some sunlight in to read my daily quarter page of “The
Weekly Times”. Having discovered the latest insights for poultry breeders or the advantages of using the Perkins Sterilised Air Process in fruit preserving, or on how to treat calluses that arise on the shoulders of horses, I would inevitably look at the calendar with its Australian scene and read the words: ‘Harry Reilly, AMP Representative, Ararat 9 2211’.
On some occasions I would repeat the words over and over again and I have even been known to sing them to a hymn tune.
A year went by and my country education was being broadened. For reasons I will explain later we cancelled the next ship to the United States, the SS Monterey, and decided to stay longer at that little church in that little country town.
Furthermore, our little daughter was now joined by our first son born in the Ararat and District General Hospital on a hot January day. While Beverley was in hospital with our new born Peter, my mother came up from Melbourne to see us. At one stage she took me to one side and said, “Son, you know where I would have been now if it had not been for the fact that I had an insurance policy on your father’s life.” I remembered my father’s death when I was eight years of age and of how he left a business at the point of bankruptcy, and his personal affairs in a terrible mess. It was only my mother’s secret provision of an AMP insurance policy on his life, which she paid off at a shilling per week from a Collector Agent who came to our front door, that gave her the lump sum at his unexpected death which enabled her to pay off the business debts and to get her family of four children of whom I was the eldest, off to a reasonable start in life.
Now was the time for Mum to remind me of my obligations. “Son, you now have two children and a wife to support. Have you got yourself covered with life insurance?” I was able to reply to her, “As a matter of fact I have been thinking about life insurance every day recently. I know the AMP insurance man, Mr. Harry Reilly, ‘Phone Ararat 9 2211 and I’ve been thinking that I must give him a call.” My mother said, “Make sure you do it before you wife comes out of hospital. You’ve got big responsibilities now.”
When my mother was visiting us it seemed like every day was Mother’s Day and I couldn’t do anything except what she indicated. The next day when I went to visit Beverley in hospital in the front foyer of the Ararat and District Hospital I noticed on the polished board with gold lettering the names of the directors of the board of management of the hospital and there was one Harry Reilly Esquire. I knew now that Harry Reilly was a man who was contributing something to the local community by his presence on the hospital board. I had learnt that he and his wife were members of the local Methodist Church, and on one occasion while visiting the Country Women’s Association, had met his wife who was handing out afternoon tea and scones.
On the way back from the hospital that day I pulled into the local service station. It was one of those country services stations of a quarter of a century ago that did things properly. The owner walked out to greet you and to take the hose from the pump and put it in your car while he chatted with you. At the same time the owner’s son or the boy at the service station would run out, open the front bonnet, check your water, battery and oil, blow up all four tyres, and then wash your front and rear windscreens. During winter he would also clean your headlights from the spattered mud of the country roads. They were the days when your service station proprietor gave you service and you usually had the opportunity to find out the local news around town at the same time.
I said to Mr. Bongiorno, “If you wanted to buy life insurance, who would you approach in Ararat?” Mr. Bongiorno said to me straight away, “Harry Reilly. He is the best man to talk to. He is a really good guy. He is the local AMP representative. If you want to, I can give you his telephone number. I’ve got it on a calendar in the office.” I said, “No worries, Mr. Bogiorno ‘Harry Reilly, AMP Representative, Ararat 9 2211.’”
I rang that number a little later and said to him, “Mr. Reilly, would you come round to my house as soon as possible, and bring your rate book. You’re not going to sell me any insurance, but I want to buy some.” He replied, “As a matter of fact, I was about to call upon you. I’d heard that you just had a new baby boy up at the hospital and I wanted to bring you round my congratulations, something for the Missus and the little nipper, and a new calendar for this new year.”
True to his word Mr. Reilly arrived with his rate book, a gift for my wife and baby Peter, and a new calendar. I said to him, “I know don’t hang it in your house, but go down to the outhouse and hang it on the nail on the back of the dunny door.”
I realized then what a superb salesman Mr. Reilly was.
The fact was that when he first came to visit me no amount of selling would have been successful. I was determined that I was not going to buy insurance. I was resistant to all sales technique. I wasn’t ready to buy. But what Mr. Reilly did was to educate me slowly by giving me a daily dose of subliminal advertising with his own name and that of the AMP Society and telephone number.
By the time my life had changed and our needs had led me to the point where I realized I needed life insurance, I knew the man Harry Reilly, I knew the product AMP insurance, and I knew his telephone number Ararat 9 2211.
Mr. Reilly never sold me a thing. He simply educated me to my needs, kept contact with me, and when I was ready to buy I gave him a call.
What a superb salesman! I learnt from Harry something of my task of representing Jesus Christ among the farmers of the country area. They did not necessarily want to buy what I had to present to them when I came talking about faith in Christ and membership in our church. But I discovered from him that if I kept calling and left the material about our church they did the education, and when they wanted to buy, they knew my number.
So I headed back to the country manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES
