by Berry Gordy
One week the Midnighters, Fats Domino, Louis Jordan and Jimmy Reed were all hot at the same time and our store was jammed with people asking for their records. Some we couldn’t get. Nobody had any, not even the distributors. That is, nobody except the Mad Russian.
After scrambling around everywhere trying to find them, I heard about him, a guy over on Hastings who always had the hottest records. The Mad Russian had a great nose for smelling a hit. He bought them all up as soon as they came out and then sold them out of his store, a one-stop, a place where record store owners could purchase all of the different distributors’ merchandise at one place. He charged a nickel more than the distributors. So if you wanted the record first, you had to deal with him.
Walking into his store was like walking into a circus, with him playing all the characters. It was always packed with everyone trying to get his attention to buy records. He talked a mile a minute, mostly incoherent.
“Okay okay, you wanna buy five, you wanna buy ten, what d’ya want? what d’ya want? Oh, big deal, big deal. See the light shining in my head. It’s cold outside. Open the door—get outta my store. Oh, open the door—get outta my store, ha.”
Everybody called him crazy, and he was—but like a fox. The bottom line was, he wanted to sell quantity, but most of the dealers wanted to buy two or three of each record.
As soon as I was able to understand his game and was a little able to pick the hits myself, I would offer to buy a whole box of twenty-five of one selection, that is, when I got my turn to talk to him. The more I bought, the more chances I got. He really acted like his name, a Mad Russian, although I soon found out he was a Jew. At that time, I didn’t know it was possible to be Russian and a Jew at the same time.
Becoming friendly with him, we were able to get the records early and business started to boom. But the store was too far in debt for us to turn things around.
The more I heard the Blues the more I liked it. I finally had to admit to myself Blues was in my soul, probably stemming from my early exposure to Gospel. There was an honesty about it; it was just as pure and real as Jazz. In fact, Jazz had its roots in the Blues. Ironically, that same simplicity I’d rejected in the Blues was the very thing that people related to.
This important lesson came too late to save the store, but would not be too late to make a difference in my songwriting.
Not only had I lost George’s and my money, but I had lost the money Pop had borrowed from the church credit union.
Pop was a strange man, a beautiful, strange man. He knew how much I wanted to do my own thing and even though I was out of a job, he never even mentioned my coming back to work for him. On the outside he seemed tough and hard, but his actions showed me he was always coming from a deep sense of caring and love.
I was more than ever determined to make him proud.
My next job was as a salesman for Guardian Service Cookware. While I had sold things before, it was at Guardian Service that I really learned the techniques of it.
I remember how I almost didn’t take the job when they told me I had to learn to cook, but Mother’s words rang in my ears: “Nothing you learn is ever wasted.”
At the end of the sales training we were so pumped up we felt we could sell anything to anybody. They had taught us all the right questions to ask, the right responses, all the tricks of the trade. But the most important knowledge to come from this was learning how to close.
We would prepare a whole meal with this cookware, using no water at all. People would give parties and invite guests over and I would cook for as many as twenty people, then make appointments with them at their homes to sell my pots.
But closing was the key. And that was easy for me because I believed so much in the product. I also believed it was worth the enormous prices we were asking. It didn’t hurt that I was getting a good percentage of that. I did well, so well in fact, that I took Pop with me to show him how successful his son had become.
He stood quietly at my side as I knocked on the door of my first appointment that morning.
The man who opened the door recognized me from a cooking demonstration a few days before. He had loved the idea that my pots and pans would save the lives of his loved ones. That was then, when he was eating free. But now, a few days later, it was pay time.
“Good morning,” I said brightly. He eyed Pop skeptically.
“Mr. Johnson, this is my father. He decided to come out with me this morning. Would you believe that my own father has never eaten food cooked in Guardian Service? I wanted him to hear how you thought it tasted. What about those carrots? Have you ever tasted carrots as sweet as that before?”
“Sure haven’t,” the man said. “They were so sweet.”
“Of course. Most of the time carrots have a slight bitter taste to them. Those carrots were sweet because they were cooked in their own juices.” I noticed Pop taking all this in. “The vitamins were all locked in—yummm,” I added. “I can still taste them.”
I sat down at a little table, pulling a chair over for Pop. I laid my sales forms on the table. At least three small half-naked kids darted around that little wartime prefabricated house with worn furniture.
“You have a wonderful family,” I told him. “My father here had eight kids to feed.” Looking at Pop I said, “I was telling Mr. Johnson and his friends the other night at the dinner about this woman at the funeral of her husband, just crying her eyes out after it was too late to do him any good. I wondered what had she done to keep him healthy while he was alive?”
That had been one of the stories I was taught in the sales meetings at Guardian Service. But then I added to it something that I truly believed. “You know,” I said, not looking squarely at either of them, “you got to take care of people when they’re still here, not cry for them after they’re gone.”
I could see they both agreed, the man nodding his head and Pop looking at me proudly.
Now it was time for the closing. I reminded the man that it was only $10 down and $10 a month. Certainly that was not too much to pay to keep a loving family healthy.
“So now, do you want the complete set of nine pieces of Guardian Service cookware for $272 or the cheaper four pots for $150?” I reminded him again, it was only $10 down and $10 a month.
“Well,” the man said, “I do want the best for my family.”
“I had a feeling you’d say that,” I said, writing $272 on the form. Laying it down in front of him, I dropped the pen—just as I’d been taught. As he picked it up I said, “Press hard. There are three copies.”
He pressed real hard. I had closed another deal.
Once outside, bubbling with pride, I was anxiously waiting for Pop’s evaluation. He said nothing. Being as cool as I could, I said, “Well, what do you think?”
“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all,” he said.
Shocked and hurt, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had been brilliant.
“You sold that man somethin’ he couldn’t afford. That po’ man with all them little babies to feed, and you sold him pots he didn’t even need. Same thing he could do with all them, he could do with one or two.”
My hurt turned to a little bit of anger. “Yeah, well, that man was grown and he had a choice. I didn’t make him buy it.”
“He loves his family and you took advantage of that. You did a good sales job. You reminded me of that white real estate man who sold me my first house on Roosevelt Street. I’m disappointed in you, son.”
That really hurt. Pop’s being disappointed in me affected me as much as that whuppin’ he’d given me when I’d taken Fuller’s money.
“Look into yourself, son. If you feel that was right, then it was. If you don’t, then it wasn’t.”
Once again, that was a lesson about principle.
I never forgot it.
I never sold another pot.
THE TREADMILL
After quitting Guardian Service, I took another turn at being a full-time songwriter
. Pop let me live rent-free in an old apartment building he owned on Meldrum Street near the river. In return, I helped take care of the place.
By now I had my own family to support.
Shortly before my record store had closed my sidekick Billy Davis—apparently no longer sure I was going somewhere—had decided to go to work in a nightclub down South as a waiter. But before that, he had come into the store one day with two young ladies. One was the fast, hip type of girl he was usually attracted to. But the other, Thelma Coleman, wasn’t. With her smooth, brown, flawless complexion, she was pretty but she was more than that. She seemed shy and sweet. Maybe the white nurse’s uniform she was wearing had something to do with it, but she seemed to have the qualities of that supportive, helpful someone with whom I could have kids and carry on my strongly ingrained family tradition. But I thought it best not to say all this to her in those initial moments. In fact, I was a little nervous about what to say to her, period.
I didn’t want to come on too strong so I waited quietly for an opening. Finally, when she said she worked at Harper Hospital, I seized the moment. I told her I was born there and that fate and destiny should never be ignored.
Within a week or two, we started going together. Now in my early twenties, the idea of settling down appealed to me.
I was ready to devote myself to being a family man. Having come from a large one, I probably had always subconsciously wanted kids. Thelma and I were married a few months later. It wasn’t long before she was pregnant. When she announced it, I was ecstatic. More than anything in the world, I wanted a son.
August 1954. It was hot. I was corralled in a room with other expectant fathers, sweating with nervous anticipation. Other new fathers had come and gone but I was still pacing. By morning, when Thelma still hadn’t delivered, I rushed home for a few minutes to change clothes and freshen up. The phone was ringing as I walked in the door. It was the nurse from the hospital.
Fear gripped me.
When she said, “You are the proud father of a baby…” my anxiety intensified as I waited for her to complete the seemingly hour-long phrase… “girl.”
Sadly, I lowered the phone to its cradle, muttering, “Thanks.” I rushed back to the hospital, my emotions in turmoil. I had wanted a son so badly, but when I looked at my baby girl I immediately felt so stupid. I was so in love with the little thing I didn’t know what to do. She captivated me in that first minute and would continue to captivate me throughout my life. We named her Hazel Joy, after Thelma’s mother.
That night I composed a little tune called “Joy.” “Even though we wanted a boy that’s how it goes. We named her Joy and I know I’m happier by far with you baby exactly just as you are, a little bundle of joy…”
And to this day, every time I sing it to her, she cries.
In October of 1955, I finally got my wish to have a son. We named him Berry IV. A year later, in August, we had another son, Terry James.
As a young father, I loved spending time with my children. Nothing inspired me more than those young, open minds. I was determined to make learning fun. I had fun, too, creating games, puzzles, riddles, contests, even flash cards for learning math and spelling. I’d be right in there competing with them, tussling and rolling on the floor. I started teaching them “If” as soon as they could talk.
One of our favorite games was when I’d line them up like little soldiers. “Okay, here we go, ready?”
Nodding, their bodies were poised to move as soon as they heard me yell out the commands in rapid succession, like my army cadence calls.
“On your knees, on your butt, on your back, stand up!”
All three scrambled to get into each position, breathlessly trying to be the first to finish, ready for the next command.
“On your front, on your back, on your knees, on your head, on your back!” And so on for several rounds until Hazel, Terry and I were all exhausted. But Berry IV was always ready for more.
Early on they began to show distinct personalities of their own. In lessons of morality, Hazel Joy was the walking and talking conscience of the family. As the oldest child, she kept her brothers in line, like a cop. Berry IV already had emerged as very athletic, later excelling at all sports.
Terry, more than the others, loved anything having to do with money. As soon as he learned to talk, he had a knack for facts and figures.
One night when Thelma and I had company over, the kids were upstairs making an awful racket. Nothing I’d said had managed to quiet them down. Not having forgotten the sting of those whuppin’s of Pop’s, I tended to spare the rod. Psychology usually got the job done for me.
Entering their room with a pillow fight in full force, I announced, “Whoever goes to sleep first gets some money.”
They stopped.
Hazel shouted, “What? Some money?”
Berry followed, “Daddy! For real?”
Terry was snoring.
Thelma’s parents helped us a lot with food and toys for the kids. Wonderful grandparents, they thought the world of those kids. As for their son-in-law? Not too much. And now that I was out of a regular job, they thought even less.
Their helpful hands became very painful to my self-esteem. Soon my songwriting endeavors became as much a joke to me as they were to everyone else. I had been called a bum for so long I thought maybe I was.
I decided I was willing to take a real job, a nine-to-fiver.
The minute my mother-in-law heard I would work, she wasted no time in using her union connections to get me a job in the Ford foundry. She told me I was lucky because the job I was getting had been a woman’s job, and I should be able to handle that easily. Sounded okay to me but I had no idea what I was in for.
That foundry was hell, a living nightmare. Hot, blowing furnaces, loud clanging noises, dust, smoke and soot everywhere, red molten metal pouring out of huge stoves on conveyor belts. When the bright red liquid steel arrived at my station, it would be cooling down from red hot to black hot. We had to wear large asbestos gloves to keep our hands from burning, while we knocked the newly formed nuts and bolts from their casings with big mallets. This place made Pop’s plastering job seem like a holiday picnic. After five minutes on the first day, I was dead. Every fifty minutes when we got a ten-minute break, I stumbled out of the foundry room. I could see people talking, but couldn’t hear a word they were saying. How was I possibly going to make it through the whole day?
Lunchtime took forever to come but when it did, I couldn’t eat. I sat there coughing up black gook from my chest. I kept telling myself I couldn’t give up. I had to make it through this first day even though there was no question in my mind that it would definitely be my last. Finally the eight hours were over. I could hardly walk. My wrists were swollen. My body was stiff. My head, arms and ears, everything ached. I slowly made it to the car, a crippled man.
Driving home, I was in a surreal nightmare. If someone blew their horn at me, I wouldn’t hear it. I kept to a snail’s pace, wondering whether I was going to hit or be hit by something. Finally, in a total vacuum of silence I made it home.
At the door, Thelma and little Hazel—Puddin’ we called her—were proudly waiting for the working man to come home. In agony, I tried to tell her that I couldn’t go back. If sound was coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t hear it.
From what I could determine through lip reading, she was assuring me that this had just been a hard first day and that I would be just fine.
She had not understood that I was saying I would never go back to that job again. When she finally got it, she was adamant, shouting at me. “Think of all the trouble my mother went through. You can’t embarrass me like this,” I imagined she was saying to me.
“I can’t do it. I just can’t do it,” I mouthed.
The next morning I rushed back to the Ford foundry to beg the supervisor for another job, enthusiastically expressing my sincere desire to work in some other capacity.
He reminded me that the job I was te
lling him I couldn’t do had been a woman’s job—an obvious attack on my manhood.
But thanks to “If” that didn’t bother me. I laughed and said, “If it’s a woman’s job then she’s a much better woman than I am a man. I still can’t do it.”
“There is no other job,” he told me. “If you don’t take this one, you’re fired.”
“I guess I’ll just have to be fired then.”
Thelma’s mother was furious. But three weeks later she had me on my way to another nine-to-fiver. If my mother-in-law’s plan was to set me up to love this new job, she sure succeeded.
The minute I walked into the Lincoln-Mercury assembly plant and saw how cool it was—no furnaces, fire or hot metal—I knew this was going to be my home for a while. Little did I know when I started how important to my future that assembly line was going to be. All I knew was those slow-moving car frames were the loveliest sight I’d ever seen. There was a pleasing simplicity to how everyone did the same thing over and over again.
For $86.40 a week, I fastened upholstery and chrome strips to those frames being pulled down the line on conveyor belts. It was a snap. I learned it so fast I could jump into each car as it arrived, do my job, get out and have time to spare. Before long that extra time was devoted to singing and writing songs.
Since I had no piano I had to devise another method of writing. I used “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” the simplest song I could think of, to form the basis to remember song ideas in my head. I gave each note or tone of the scale a number from one to seven. “Mary Had A Little Lamb” turned out to be 3212333-222-355-32123333-22321. I practiced other simple songs putting numbers to them as well. Once I could identify each tone with a number of the scale, I had it made. As I began to create interesting melodies in my head, I would associate each note with a number. This allowed me to remember my new musical ideas.