365 DAYS PROJECT

2003   JUNE 27   #178

Paul Harvey - I Am Amway

Way back in the late 1970s, a friend of mine told me that his parents had so many cats that they couldn't take in any more, and so when one of the females bore a new litter they'd drown the newborns in the toilet. These people, mind you, claimed to be good Christians and staunch "pro-life" supporters.

They were also Amway distributors -- and, as far as I'm concerned, were typical of the kind of people who would take up such a creepy venture. Much as with other pyramid-type sales schemes, such as Mary Kay Cosmetics and Herbalife, nobody ever bought an Amway product because no other similar product would do; they bought it because the salesperson was so obnoxious that purchasing something would be the only way to get them out of your house. Successful Amway distributors were not merely ambitious, they were -- like my friend's parents -- aggressive to the point of sociopathic.

Not long after my friend's sickening revelation, another friend offered me an LP he'd recently found but didn't want to keep. Sensing the possibility of some high weirdness within, I leapt at the chance to make the 3-LP set 1968 Amway International Convention my own. Alas, it turned out to be a bit less odd than I'd hoped, filled as it is with speech after speech proclaiming the miracles of the Amway way; if they held a kitten-drowning workshop or anything like that, the recording of it was withheld from this set. About the only place where the collection deviates from a standard-issue sales motivation record is in the convention's keynote address, delivered, in his usual half-berserk style, by right-wing radio commentator Paul Harvey. He is Amway.

- Phil Milstein

TT-3:18 / 3.8MB / 160kbps 44.1khz
from 3-LP set of 1968 Amway International Convention


(Image courtesy of Phil Milstein)