The Bygone Days of Door-To-Door Selling
In the 1950s the Fuller Brush Man was a frequent visitor to every home in the Fairview Area. I was just a young girl, living on McFatridge Road at the time, but I remember his visits well. He would arrive carrying his black suitcase filled with all kinds of brushes to sell. After being invited in he opened the suitcase and began his sales pitch.
At that time most women didn’t work outside the home and were ‘stay at home’ housewives with many children to look after, so it was difficult to shop outside the home. Door-to-door salesman filled a much-needed service, they sold all different kinds of items, such as milk, bread, vegetables, meat, fish and ice, insurance and even a photographer with a pony in tow would offer to take pictures of children sitting on the pony, which was very popular in the 1940s-50s.
Alfred Carl Fuller was the original Fuller Brush Man, born on a farm in Welsford, Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. He was described as a rugged, six-footer, broad chested with the muscular arms and enormous hands of a seasoned lumberjack. His voice was oddly soft, his manner courtly in an old fashioned way and often called himself a country bumpkin. He was vigorous and active with a keen interest in people.
He was born in 1885, the 11th of 12 children and as a boy he picked strawberries as a source of income. At the age of eighteen he packed his bags and left Nova Scotia to seek his future in Boston, as many of his older siblings had done before him. His brother, who was a motorman on the Boston Elevated Railway, got him a job as a conductor in the railway. His next job was a gardener, handyman and the third was driving an express wagon for his brother Robert, who operated a small delivery service. All three jobs didn’t last long. He then took a job with the Somerville Brush and Mop Company, which was a modest Boston firm. Given a brief instruction into the art of selling door-to-door, the firm gave him a sample case with 25 brushes, and he was sent out to sell. He enjoyed his new job, said he washed babies with a back brush, swept stairs, cleaned radiators and milk bottles, dusted floors, anything that would prove the worth of what he had to sell. The job also gave him a certain freedom along with money and he was able to save $375.00 in a short period of time and with that he thought of going into the brush business himself.
He paid attention to what his customers said they needed and could not purchase, such as a brush for cleaning silk hats or a brush that would not scratch wooden floors and later with that in mind, he created his own type of brushes that were designed for specific needs of his customers. He set up a basement workshop, invested $80.00 for equipment and material, along with a hand-cranked wire-twisting machine which he designed himself. He worked hard making clothes brushes and mops at night, then sold them during the day. He did both for four months, averaging $50.00 a week before deciding to extend his territory.
In 1906, he went to Hartford Connecticut where he rented a shed for his new factory and called his company, “The Capital Brush Company,” but six years later he discovered another business by that same name, so he changed his to “The Fuller Brush Company.” At that time one of his most popular brushes was the lady’s skirt and train brush, which was used to get rid of mud from the bottom of women’s skirts.
He offered a lifetime guarantee with every purchase and was such a success in Hartford that he couldn’t keep up with the orders, because he was still making all his brushes with his own two hands on that same machine he’d started with. He then hired two employees to aid in Manufacturing while he devoted most of his time to selling and by 1911, he put an advertisement in “Everybody’s Magazine” for agents to sell his new line of brushes. In a week he had hired 45 men and had to hire a secretary. He gave each employee a territory along with a simple sales kit that held 25 brushes and items, charging each $6.00 and told them to go out and sell. He offered a free item, such as a brush of comb to every housewife that he visited and that got his foot in the door (so to speak), but he was in no way a pushy salesperson. He expanded his enterprise to Canada in 1908 and the business prospered.
By 1950 Alfred Fuller had built a sixty-hour a week job peddling brushes door-to-door into a multimillion-dollar business empire. He was so well known that he had two movies made after him, one in 1948 called “The Fuller Brush Man” starring Red Skelton and another in 1950 called “The Fuller Brush Girl” starring Lucille Ball. In 1933 there was also a Disney version of “The Three Little Pigs” in which the big bad wolf disguised himself as a Fuller Brush salesman. There was a song by James McMurtry, released in 1995 called “Fuller Brush Man” and another song by John Prine called “The Frying Pan”, about a man’s wife who ran off with The Fuller Brush Man.
Hank Snow, the well-known singer from Nova Scotia worked as a Fuller Brush salesman prior to becoming famous. Other renowned people that were employed earlier as Fuller Brush salesmen were Dr. Billy Graham and Joe DiMaggio.
Alfred married and divorced a girl from Nova Scotia named Evelyn Ells. They had two sons, Howard born in 1913 and Avard born in 1916. Howard took over the business in 1943 and was president until his death in 1959, because of a car accident, Avard then took over the helm until 1969. The company remained in the Fuller family’s hands until 1968, when it was sold to the Sara Lee Corporation.
Alfred’s second wife Mary Primrose (Pelton) was from Yarmouth, NS. and it was there that they purchased a home where the family spent their summers. The home was known as the Pelton-Fuller House and in 1996 Primrose donated the house, at 20 Collins Street, to the Yarmouth County Museum where it was restored and open to the public.
Alfred Fuller was initiated into the York Rite of Freemasonry and elevated to the highest degree of Grand master. He died in Hartford, Connecticut in 1973 at the age of 88 and is buried at Pleasant Valley Cemetery in Somerset, Nova Scotia.
