“But,” said O’Brien, “by us in Sales it’s _hit, hit, hit_, all the time. We can’t wait for you boys to get that tail pinned on straight. But sometimes you do, don’t you?” Hе sighed. “God help us, some of the characters I associate with don’t even know that. They can’t see any difference between having something to sell and having to sell something. So when you _do_ hit, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do at my end.” He was as good as his word, too. A couple of times when we’d fumbled around and come up with a product that people really needed, something to keep them from dying, for instance, or to make not dying worth their while, he went to bat for us in the sales department. I’ve described at length the situation at Gorley and Gorley, first because it had a direct bearing on what happened later, and second because it was typical of a way of life which is past, and which the younger generation nowadays has difficulty even in imagining. I’m referring, of course, to the middle of the twentieth century with its feverish atmosphere of compulsory Progress or a reasonable facsimile thereof and of the glitter that was sometimes gold. It was the era of the false front, the false rear and the questionable middle, of scandal, slander, and the Hard Sell. It was also the Age of the Big Lie, as somebody called it. But it was even more the age of the little half-truth. During those years when I was growing up--a painful process then, though it doesn’t seem to be so any more--my education prоgressed along other lines as well. There was my baptism of politics. I joined with the enthusiasts working for nomination of a reform slate of candidates against those of the city machine. We were too innocent to know that it was an unpropitious time. For one thing, it wasn’t a Presidential year and the vote was bound to be light, and for another, the last reform administration was still too fresh in public memory, and the machine was riding high. The opposition called us idealistic crackpots, conniving scoundrels, and dimwits who didn’t know what it was all about. They had the money and they spent it on a flood of lies from the platform, through the mail, and from sound trucks that rolled bellowing through the streets. Finally, our candidates were snowed under in the primaries and not so much as a reform dogcatcher appeared on the ticket. That was another bruising experience for an easy bruiser such as I was. After the crescendo of activity, the speeches, the leaflets, the house-to-house canvasses, after the starry-eyed phrases about cleaning up local government as a first step toward cleaning up the country and the world....