Xerox: The Wild Years

By Herbert Taylor

to all the people I worked with and work for, thanks for making everyday a new event, most of them enjoyable..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781636923833

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Xerox

The Wild Years

Herbert Taylor

Copyright © 2022 Herbert Taylor

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-63692-382-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63692-383-3 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Xerox—The Wild Years

Too Big to Get through the Door

The New Two-Week Xerox School at Fort Lauderdale

The Ultimate Xerox Salesman

The Sinking Spell

Orgain, Bell, and Tucker Attorneys at Law

C. Peter McColough—Xerox CEO

IBM—The Copier War

Walter Isaacson

Tennis with Mrs. Walton

Airmail Delivery—Maybe

I tried to help the tech department

The Red Baron

Jamaica

Blind Date—Almost

The Xerox Demo Van

C. Peter—Astrodome

The Army Corp of Engineers—Toledo Bend Dam

The Xerox New Year's Party

Dick Terrell—My Sales Manager

Carl Votti—DuPont Construction

The Ugly Ties

The White House Department Store in Beaumont

The Calcasieu Parish Sheriff

Missed My Toe

The New Xerox Memorywriter

Larry Huddleston, Where Are You?

Congressman Jack Brooks

Olivia ( Ford ) Munson.

Olivia ( Ford ) Munson, worked for Rank Xerox in London.

Her father, a colonel in the Army Air Force in 1943, was killed, flying a P-38 fighter in defense of the bombers, that we're bombing the German, Polesti, oil fields.

She married one of my high school classmates and best friend, Joe Munson, who blocked for John David Crow, at A & M University, the year John David Crow won the Heisman trophy.

Xerox—The Wild Years

Joe Becker would not move from Houston to Beaumont—January 1967.

I found this out forty-seven years later, at lunch with Joe in Dallas, at a lunch with five other ex-Xeroids. He thought Beaumont was the armpit of the world.

I was working for A. B. Dick Company when the other salesman at our office saw an ad in the local newspaper that a new company, Xerox, was interviewing for a salesman in Beaumont. We flipped a coin to see who would go interview. I don't remember if I won or lost…but I went.

I thought the interview with Ted Roberts went terrible. But for some reason, January 17, 1967, my thirtieth birthday, I was offered the job. I almost had a heart attack. Back then, you went cradle to the grave with the same company.

Here I was about to go to work for this new company, and I was not sure they would even make it.

But the main reason I took the job was that I spent two weeks in Chicago, in the dead of winter, at the A. B. Dick corporate offices, in a classroom with about twenty other salesman, trying to understand how we could beat the new Xerox 2400 copier. We had a printing press that, we were telling the world, could produce twenty copies of an original at a cheaper price than the new Xerox 2400 that could produce forty copies per minute. All the math at this school was wrong, and one of my classmates brought this up to the instructor. He went wild and screamed at us to shut up, and anyone else who brought this up would be fired.

The very first day there, they took us all on a tour of the officers and manufacturing plant in the back—a very large old drab, dark brick building.

They showed us a small brick building inside the manufacturing area where they made the World War II Norden bomb sites for all our bombers. They said they used spiderwebs for the crosshairs inside the bomb sites.

But it seemed they were most proud of the chair in the office lobby, where Chester Carlson, the inventor of the xerographic process, sat for five days, trying to see someone, to tell them what he had to offer. IBM did the same thing.

Guess what—at the new Xerox training school, in Fort Lauderdale, were four of my Chicago A. B. Dick classmates.

Joe Becker died this year, 2015. Cancer finally got him. I bought his lunch, I thought I owed him at least that, since he changed my life and started my twenty years at Xerox.

The Wild Years

Too Big to Get through the Door

One day, during the week of December 3–7, 1973, some special people helped me and the wife get to Jamaica for five days.

It was December, and I was short of quota to make the Xerox President's Club, which, if qualified, was a trip to Jamaica.

I don't remember who my sales manager was then, but I think Carl Francis was the salesman who got the order from the Polk County commissioners to install a Xerox 2400 duplicator. It was to be installed in the tax office in the Polk County courthouse in Livingston.

Carl had turned in the purchase order and the Xerox contract, and I think he had been promoted to sales manager for Beaumont. Now I remember who my sales manager was that week.

He gave me the territory a week or so earlier, so I could be the installing salesman and make my quota for the Jamaica trip.

Carl told me he had not delivered the electrical outlet that Xerox provided for the customer to install. So I made the two-hour trip to Livingston to deliver the outlet and see where the 2400 was to be installed.

Guess what? The tax office had a door and doorframe that was steel plate, like on a battleship. I don't know if Carl had measured the door frame width, but I did.

It was half an inch too narrow…

I asked the county judge if we could put it in another office. He said no and walked away shaking his head.

I don't think I said anything to Carl. I need that machine installed.

The morning the 2400 was delivered to the courthouse was bone cold, but it was dry. I knew I had a problem, and I did not have an answer.

The installers wanted to take it up the steps in front of the courthouse, but I knew it was not going through that steel doorway.

I told them to just put it in front of the steps with all the