Just A Poor, Dumb Dirt Farmer

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The Colonel ordered a hundred more and the two men drew up a handbill that looked like a wanted poster for a member of the James Gang and started hawking the curers, which sold quickly. The Colonel, sensing something big, ordered 800 more. Then he made what he considers was a fatal mistake; he hired an M.B.A., newly graduated from a well-known southern university, to market the new curers. "I don't know what came over me," the Colonel says. "Farmers want to see things in operation, but this guy never wanted to leave his office in Richmond. One day I just got fed up. I called him and told him to get his butt out in the field. And the next day his wife called me and said she didn't want her husband doing any manual labor. I reminded her that I hadn't hired her, and then I fired her husband."

But it was too late. The sales campaign never regained its momentum. The Colonel still owns 732 revolutionary tobacco curers. "I lost $60,000 on that one," he says, "but I haven't give up yet With the price of every other fuel going up, sawdust is looking better all the time."

After the currer flasco, the Colonel quickly returned to his do-it-yourself brand of romancing and merchandising and scored a big hit with Gregory's Virgin Spring Water. He knew there was a need for the stuff, because as he traveled to trade shows in various cities, he often found that he couldn't drink the local water Instead, he filled Thermos jugs with spring water and took them along on his trips. "I ask you," he says. "What would you rather drink: recycled sewer-age or my Virgin Spring Water?" So back he went to his dog-eared directories and telephone books, his time looking for private-label bottlers with established distribution networks. He sent out his letters, distributed his samples, and took visiting customers home for dinner. As a result, the Colonel's elixir is now sold to bottlers in 12 eastern states.

The Colonel added another winner in the early '70s when he introduced Gregory's Incense Cedar Bits. These flakes are made from the stems of a highly aromatic species of cedar tree that grows naturally on Gregory land. The Colonel always knew they were there, but it wasn't until he started running the Gregory General Store that he discovered there might be commercial use for the fragrant stems.

As part of his "everything for everybody" policy at the store, the Colonel used to sell handmade pine coffins at $49.50 each to local tenant farmers and personally deliver them to their homes. Usually, when he arrived, the traditional "sit-up" was already well under way. A "sit-up," the Colonel explains, is a funeral observation, something like a wake, that was peculiar to tenant farmers in the area. It could last a week or more, the Colonel says, because it took that long for all the family's friends and relatives to arrive from distant farms. The Colonel often saw large bundles of cedar stems smoking in the family's yard. When he asked what they were used for, he was told that they were a kind of ceremonial incense long known to ward off evil spirits.

"The custom died out in the late '40s," the Colonel says, "but those cedar stems stuck in my mind. When I bought the big chipper, I knew that I could process them just like Hickory Bits."

Today, the fragrant chips are sold to chemical and pharmacecutical companies for use in a number of products including deodorizers, detergents, and cosmetics.

Even though the Colonel has become increasingly proficient over the years in spotting and filling needs, occasionally he still hits a snag. Recently he ran into some unexpected marketing difficulties with his Virgin Hog Crap. The Colonel first used this fertilizing miracle on his own lawn. He thought it was great stuff and convinced some golf course and park groundskeepers to try it on their green sward. The grass loved it. Unfortunately, for two or three days after application, there was this disturbing odor in the air, which greatly offended local authorities.

The Colonel had even gone so far as to send out his habitual promotion letter to several lawn and garden centers. One owner of a New Jersey store, he relates incredulously, actually called him up and asked how the powerful fertilizer was made. But the Colonel remains convinced of his product's merit and thinks that he may have solved his marketing problem. "I've come up with a way to deodorize the stuff," he says, "using dolomitic limestone and a couple of secret ingredients that I can't describe because my competition will no doubt capitalize on it."

When asked if he thought his product's slightly indelicate name might be a drag on sales, the Colonel said he saw it as a personal challenge. "Anyone can sell manure," he says, "but how many people can merchandise crap?"

That's Colonel S. Stone Gregory, Jr. Maybe the last of his kind, maybe the only one of his kind. He says that right now he has five or six new product ideas, and he points to the stack of new telephone directories as proof of his claim. Then he leans back in his swivel chair and sighs: "But I'm still just a poor, dumb dirt farmer trying to keep his head above the waterline."

You be the judge.

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