I went back to her letters to see if I could get some idea of what her figure was like from a physical description I remembered seeing and skimming over. When I located it, I learned she was five-feet-four and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds. At least she wasn’t fat.
She also said her hair was ash blonde and her eyes gray, then added the interesting information that she still had all of her own teeth. On second reading I discovered that the picture was three years old, but she assured me she hadn’t changed appreciably in the interim.
Mavis called, “Dinner in ten minutes,” and I put the letters aside to go shower and dress.
We stayed home that evening. After dinner Mavis and I sat on the cottage’s screened porch and discussed business.
“I like the sound of this farm-bred woman best,” I said. “What’s her name again?”
“Helen Larson. A Swede, I guess.”
“You been following the ads of small-town businesses up for sale?”
“Just the last couple of weeks. There isn’t any point in keeping a record of old out-of-date ads for places which would probably be sold when we got around to inquiring about them. There’s a small dairy in Benton, Illinois, with an asking price of thirty thousand, with a third down.”
“Too close to Tuscola,” I objected. “We’ll stay away from that section of the country this trip.”
“Well, there’s a tavern for sale in Rome, New York.”
I gave her a disgusted look. “Without me you’d last about five minutes in this business. A tavern means a liquor license, and the New York State ABC board checks license applicants clear back to their birth.”
“You wouldn’t have to apply for the license until after you bought the place,” Mavis said defensively. “And since you’d never actually buy it—”
I cut her off by asking, “What else?”
“A farm appliance store in Westfield, New York. That’s way over in the west end of the state. Twenty-five thousand cash.”
“That’s our baby,” I said. “Where’s the ad?”
The ad had been cut from the current issue of a national farm journal, Mavis told me. It read:
For sale: Established farm appliance store with equipment and inventory worth fifteen thousand dollars wholesale. Five-thousand-dollar annual net earning. Price $25,000 cash.
The advertiser was a man named Herman Gwynn with a Main Street address in Westfield.
“A farm appliance store ought to appeal to a gal who was raised on a farm,” I said. “Take a couple of letters.”
Chapter XII
While I always let Mavis handle the correspondence with women without paying much attention to what she was writing, she didn’t know enough about business matters to handle that end. I had to do this myself.
The first letter I dictated was to Herman Gwynn, merely expressed interest in his ad and asked for further details. The second was to the Westfield, New York Chamber of Commerce. It went:
Gentlemen:
I have had considerable experience in retail merchandising and have been looking around for a chance to invest in a business for myself. I have answered an ad by a Mr. Herman Gwynn of your city who wants to sell his farm appliance business. The asking price is $25,000.
I have ten thousand cash to invest and would plan on financing the balance through one of your local banks if Mr. Gwynn and I come to an agreement. But before going to the trouble of a fifteen-hundred-mile trip, I would like certain information.
First, I would appreciate knowing if Mr. Gwynn is a member of your Chamber, as I would accept this as at least tentative evidence that he is a reliable businessman. Second, I would like your opinion on what my reception would be at your local banks if I wanted to take a fifteen-thousand-dollar mortgage on the business. And third, I would appreciate whatever general data you have available on the farm appliance business in that area, including the number and size of similar businesses I would be in competition with.
Very truly yours,
“Now,” I said to Mavis, “just exactly what have you written to this Helen Larson?”
Mavis’s letters to the woman had followed their usual pattern. My wife wasn’t very imaginative, which was the reason I could let her handle the love correspondence without supervision. She always told women approximately the same thing, varying only such items as place of birth and my work background to conform geographically to whatever part of the country we happened to live in at the moment.
This time she had me born on a farm in central Florida, as usual gave me only a high school diploma and had me the hired manager of a beach concession which sold sports equipment in order to explain our exclusive address. I discovered I had confessed to a steady income of forty-eight hundred a year, out of which I had managed to save slightly more than a seven-thousand-dollar nest egg.
Mavis had mentioned herself as my younger sister who lived with me and held a minor stenographic position. And as usual she had carefully inserted the information that I expected my sister to continue to live with me in the event I married.
Aside from that, the only real information she had given out was that we had no relatives, having decided to dispense with a pair of aged parents on this trip. She had been purposely vague concerning the business-partnership angle mentioned in my ad, merely saying that I was investigating several alternatives.
When Mavis finished briefing me on what had passed between me and Helen Larson, I got out the Atlas and located St. Joseph, Missouri.
“About fifty miles from Kansas City,” I said after studying the map for a few moments. “If she doesn’t know anybody, that ought to be far enough away to meet her. Write her a letter and mention that I plan to be in K. C. soon. Don’t pin it down to a definite date, but ask if she’d be interested in meeting me and talking things over in person.”
“All right,” Mavis said.
She got out her portable typewriter, and for the rest of the evening I watched television while she typed.
We got an answer from Herman Gwynn four days later, which led me to believe he was anxious to unload the store. In his letter Gwynn explained that his reason for wanting to sell out was that his wife’s health required movement to a warmer and drier climate. He gave additional details about the business, including that the building was located on Main Street in the heart of West-field’s shopping district and that there were still six years to run on its ten-year lease, with an option to renew when the lease expired. He employed one male clerk and one female combination bookkeeper-clerk, both of which I could either keep or replace as I desired, as neither was under contract and could be discharged on fifteen days’ notice.
Gwynn also enclosed a financial statement showing that the business was unencumbered and that its net profit for the past two years had run $5,412.13 and $4,928.17 respectively.
Noting that the financial statement listed the bookkeeper-clerk’s salary as $2,500, it occurred to me that if Mavis and I hadn’t been interested in the store merely as a decoy, it actually might make a pretty good legitimate business enterprise.
I said to Mavis, “I think we’d better sink our hooks into this thing fast before somebody really looking for a business makes him an offer. If Gwynn hasn’t doctored his figures, a man and wife operating the place together and letting one employee go could net seventy-five hundred a year.”