Last week Death came to a squeaky-voiced Canadian named Harold F. Ritchie as he lay on a Toronto operating table. His name is not found on many rosters of the business great, yet he had good claim to the proud title of "World's Greatest Salesman." His Harold F. Ritchie & Co., Ltd. is a globe-embracing network of sales agencies through which such commodities as Rubberset brushes, Tanglefoot fly paper, Glover's Mange Cure and Fralinger's Salt Water Taffy have been broadcast over six continents. His, too, the control of such famed products as Eno's Fruit Salt, Scott's Emulsion, Pompeian beauty cream. And his nom de guerre, immortal in the annals of super-salesmanship, was "Carload Ritchie."
Harold F. Ritchie was 52 when he died. Appendicitis was the immediate cause, but it was really overwork that did it. He talked day and night, sat up till 4 a. m. if he could get a buyer to listen to him, never walked, played golf, or took any form of exercise, ate only when he happened to think of it (and then in huge quantities). Though he was a devoted family man, he spent less time at home than he did traveling. An air trip around South America to look at his agencies was a routine matter; he once estimated he traveled 125,000 mi. a year. All his traveling was by automobile or plane; trains ran on too regular a schedule for Carload Ritchie. Last autumn he took a trip to the Pacific Coast, insisted on calling on wholesalers in person, sold four carloads of Eno's before he was through. Warmhearted, he would give away anything his friends admired, used to keep 20 or 30 men working till late in the evening and then take them all to a musical show. His own taste ran to sentimental "gypsy" music and Viennese waltzes which he would listen to with the tears running down his plump cheeks. There is reason to believe that Carload Ritchie died on the threshold of a vaster career. Born in the hamlet of Bobcaygeon, Ontario, he used to hang around the local hotel as a schoolboy, eagerly watching the smart traveling salesmen. When he became a salesman himself, it was as a commission agent for more & more old British grocery and drug houses. In 1928 he startled the conservative Britishers in control of Eno's Fruit Salt, whose U. S. and Canadian agent he had been for many years, by buying it (for a reported $10,000,000). Its parent company, International Proprietaries, showed $944,000 earnings in 1931. In 1930 he bought from Colgate-Palmolive-Peet their Pompeian beauty cream business. His partners in the deal were the Shoemakers of Elmira, N. Y., owners of the Frostilla line of beauty lotions, which Ritchie once sold in Canada. In 1931, again in partnership with the Shoemakers, he bought from Scott & Bowne for "several million dollars" their famed old Scott's Emulsion. Thus he was in full stride of expansion when Death overtook him. His executives will carry on the business, but no longer will a squeaky-voiced little man perch on their desks by the hour, no longer will he buttonhole them in thickly carpeted corridors to tell them his newest story.