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Bibles & Whisky. Their freewheeling techniques were made famous by the fictional Alexander Botts, whose adventures as sales manager of the Earthworm Tractor Co. have delighted readers of the Saturday Evening Post since 1927. Earthworm is patterned after the Caterpillar Tractor Co., which was formed by a merger of Holt and another manufacturer named C. L. Best. Botts's creator: onetime Caterpillar Mechanic William Hazlett Upson.
Though Botts is fictional, his adventures are easily matched by real salesmen in the fiercely competitive equipment industry. Rival bulldozer salesmen are often forced by a prospective buyer to match their machines against each other; whichever can move the most earth in a day gets the sale. Once a classic, week-long competition was held in Texas between Holt and Allis-Chalmers to determine who would get a fat contract. With a less powerful tractor than their rival, Holt's men devised a Botts-like scheme to win the day. They worked like demons from dawn to dark—except when their rivals came across town to check on their progress. Then Holt's operators slowed to a crawl, casually stopped their machines, chatted blithely with spectators. The Allis-Chalmers team became overconfident, cut down its work pace, lost the contest and the contract.
Caterpillar Sales Manager W. Kenneth Cox, Botts's real-life counterpart, once discovered a competitor listening in on his conversation from an adjoining restaurant booth. By loudly discussing a distant contractor as a ripe sales prospect, he sent his eager rival off on a 400-mile wild-goose chase. Another salesman learned that a contractor in his territory was devoutly religious, boned up on the Bible before seeing him. Said the salesman on finding the contractor building a new church, "Say, brother. You're doing the work of the Lord." The salesman dropped a few Biblical verses, so impressed the contractor that he was invited to preach a Sunday sermon at the new church. He preached a hellfire sermon, ended up selling his prospect two tractors instead of one. Then he went to the nearest hotel and celebrated the sale with a jug of Prohibition whisky.
New Family. Road building got one of its biggest boosts from another deeply religious contractor named Robert Gilmour LeTourneau, who made "a deal with God" to turn over 90% of his personal earnings to the church. In the 19303, when road building was spurred by the huge WPA and PWA road projects, he switched to manufacturing earthmovers, became the first to put pneumatic tires on the steel wheels of tractors, scrapers, etc., thus enabling them to move quickly over highways and do the job faster. Despite the Depression, some earthmoving manufacturers doubled and tripled their sales; LeTourneau's jumped 1,026% in only three years. The first superhighways, Connecticut's Merritt Parkway (started in 1934) and the Pennsylvania Turnpike (1938), became showplaces for the new dozers, scrapers and pavers—and the whole new family of road-building equipment that grew up with them.