I moved from a marketing position at PWS to a field sales position in the Western Los Angeles/Long Beach hardside territory in March 1996. Since I had only worked in mathematics and engineering, the biology list and market were big mysteries to me. One Sunday evening shortly after I had arrived in Los Angeles, Jack called me at home and proceeded to spend the next 100 minutes going over the biology list and the adoption history and key decision makers at all my schools. I was amazed at the depth of his memory and knowledge, knowing that Jack no doubt possessed this level of detail for every single hardside territory. I was also a bit alarmed that this guy thought nothing of taking up the heart of my Sunday evening to talk shop. As we wound down our conversation I puckishly said to him, “Happy Easter, Jack,” because, yes, this was Easter Sunday. Probably no one who knows him will be surprised that Jack’s response was a puzzled, “Oh, is today Easter?”
That fall Jack came down to work the Southern California schools. I was somewhat worried because I had been assigned to work with him on a Friday, and college professors in Los Angeles are notoriously hard to find on the last day of the work week. UCLA had been using Starr/Taggart off and on but the current professor had switched to Campbell, and Jack wanted to make sure that we got them back in our camp. We went to see the professor teaching the course that fall and she assured Jack that her apostasy had nothing to do with dissatisfaction with Starr, she had just wanted to give Campbell a try. She also gave us a heads-up on which one of her colleagues had been assigned to teach the course that winter, so we set out to find him.
As everyone who worked campus with him knows, Jack didn’t believe in going to office hours: he always thought the best way to see someone was to track them down in their classroom. We found where the winter instructor was teaching and walked up to the front of the lecture hall as his class ended. Jack introduced us, explained the reason for our visit, and asked if we could sit down with him to discuss Starr/Taggart. The instructor explained that he had a number of commitments that afternoon and would not be available until 7:00 pm, after he played in his weekly intramural soccer match. I felt my heart sink when Jack quickly made the appointment to meet the instructor in his office at 7:00 pm – I was in my mid-20s and had an infinite number of other ways I would rather spend a Friday night. After killing the rest of the afternoon at Santa Monica College and miraculously finding a biology instructor there to talk to, we headed back to UCLA to make the 7:00 pm sales call and that winter the UCLA introductory biology course used Starr/Taggart. A week later I put on a necktie to made an 8:00 am Saturday sales call at El Camino College to close the guy who taught the Saturday morning biology section, because I knew that’s what Jack would do.
After seeing him in action, every time I sold biology I tried to replicate exactly how Jack presented in his sales calls. I used the same hand-outs that he used (and so thoughtfully provided for us), showed the same examples of artwork that he showed and did my best to repeat word-for-word what he said in describing the awesomeness of the book. Thanks to Jack’s expert tutelage I became pretty proficient in selling biology, especially as technology and media became such important factors in adoption decisions.
A year or so after our Friday night UCLA escapade, Jack was planning another Southern California sales swing at our January NSM. As he was trying to figure out how to allocate his precious time among the half-dozen reps in the region, an opportunity at one of my schools came up. Jack looked at our sales manager and said, “That’s John’s school, right? He has a good handle on selling biology; he doesn’t need my help.” It was the greatest compliment I ever received in my publishing career.
My condolences to everyone who admired and loved him.
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