In 1983 I was the terminal manager for a national trucking company in Portland Oregon. The fact that I was the manager is the backdrop of the story that I am about to tell you. I had just been transferred to Portland from Los Angeles where I had been managing another terminal there for the company. Since I grew up in Portland it was nice to be back where Christmas was not 80 degrees with no chance of snow and I could see the mountains again.
My first duty in Portland was to organize a new sales team. The Operations staff was an experienced one so it gave me the time to find some good sales personnel and devote my time and energy to improving our business and revenue. My objective was to hire some good people with sales background but not in our industry. I thought it would give me a chance to train them the way I wanted them trained instead of them already having preconceived ideas and bad habits to overcome. The fact that they all turned out to be fisherman was an added bonus and was to become a real incentive in turning our sales program around. The Portland terminal was loosing money and it was my job to get us into the black. My projection was that it would take at least 6 months after I got our new sales department trained.
One of the new salesman who was the second one I hired was a real go- getter. He was the youngest and possibly the least experienced. I really took him under my wing in the first year. I even took a sales territory myself and we all competed in sales revenue and routing requests. It didn't take this guy long to give me some great competition. Planning a customer fishing trip.....
We all decided early our second year we would have a customer fishing trip! It was going to be for three days. We were starting to develop a real good customer base and knew we would need to spend some money to keep our program solvent. We decide on a small productive trout lake in southern Oregon called Diamond Lake! It is a few miles from Crater Lake and some nice Rainbows are produced from there. At this time it had it's own hatchery so you would catch a few more hatchery fish then wild rainbows. All together there were 30 of us. We had five cabins with 6 people per cabin. That was one sales men per cabin with some of his best customers. We rented boats and stocked the cabin refrigerators with food. In the years following we all ate at the lodge as feeding this crew was quite a challenge!
We were out on the fog covered lake by day light the first day. My young salesman had fished there as a kid and new the great spots. So, he would lead the boat convoy to the spots and we would pitch in the anchors. Velveta was the choice bait at that time much as Power Bait is today. I had never fished with it before but soon learned it was preferable to my worms even though I had caught the first fish and it was 19 inches. After sitting there for the next couple hours watching everyone else catch one after another I decided Velveta would do for me just fine. I had fished with worms all my life and it just didn't seem right fishing with cheese, but pride aside I molded the creamy cheese around my size 18 treble hook. We were limited out by noon and playing Poker by 1PM with steaks on the barbecue. The next two days were pretty much the same with the exception of possibly half the guys getting up at noon to go fishing after playing poker all night long.
Those were some great trips we used to have and our business would almost double the month after the trips. Our terminal was never again in the Red! When I became Region Manager I always made sure I was in attendance at the yearly fishing trip! Still to this day I go fishing with my old friend Gordon who was the salesman I hired so many years ago. Fishing and friendship go hand in hand and is such a great part of our past memories! And what great memories they have been.
