AUTOS: Taxi Salesman

James Francis Waters is a World War I veteran (Army air corps instructor) who went to California to try his hand at selling airplanes, found he was a little ahead of his time. He switched to a two-by-four used-car agency, soon made the happy discovery that there was nothing like the automobile business for a supersalesman in the '205. By 1929 he was Chrysler's distributor for its new De Soto in all of northern California.

If the golden era of salesmen ended with the '29 crash, nobody told Waters about it. His fortunes...

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