Goodbye Spot!

[Ca Bob]

Yeah, originally there was Leon Ames Ford. Ames had been a successful movie, radio, and television actor. Then there was Ralph Williams, who did the dog Storm commercials as part of his sponsorship of all night movies. It must have been hard to follow that act in the local car sales business, so Cal Worthington started doing a different kind of animal each week or so. Neither Ralph nor Cal had a good reputation in terms of ethical business activities. One neighbor of mine referred to one of them: "They have to screw him into his shoes," referring to him being crooked. I would imagine that both of the dealerships did the things that car dealers became infamous about.

Once, long ago, I dropped in on Worthington Ford to look at a pickup truck. The young sales guy did everything that car salesmen are infamous for. I couldn't get him to answer one simple question: What does it cost? Apparently this is not a known quantity in the world of car sales. I recall that he kept trying to get me to discuss how much I wanted to pay monthly, and various other car sales games that I had read about. Anyway, I actually started to get a headache (rare for me) from all the irritation, and somebody on the lot told me about a different dealership that had a "pay one price" system.

So I never got to become one of the thousands of people who could say they bought a car from Cal Worthington.