Traveling Salesman : He Counts the Miles, His Blessings

Somewhere between Newberry and Joanna, out where the road winds north through tired mill towns and hills of honeysuckle and kudzu, Bob Hazel starts to sing softly to himself, accompanying the instrumental on station WEZY on his car radio: “The wind and the willow play, love’s sweet melo-deeee. . . .”

He reaches down to the floorboard and takes a sip from his mug of coffee, grown cold in the miles between here and the home he left early this morning in Columbia.

“This beats the dickens out of sitting behind a desk, I’ll tell you that,” he says. His ’82 Buick Regal, air conditioner purring, windows rolled up to keep out the heavy, damp noontime heat, speeds on toward the one-room whiskey stores ahead, carrying a man in pursuit of his livelihood, if not his dreams.

What Could Have Been

Hazel, a whiskey salesman on the back roads of South Carolina at the age of 56, wonders sometimes where life would have led him had he finished college like his three older brothers, who, he says, “have moved far ahead of me now.”

But Hazel has kept moving too, all his life, and he has been to life’s extremes.

Thirty years ago this summer he flirted with fame in a brief, spectacular major league baseball career that, for all practical purposes, started and ended in a single season.

And six years ago this November he was courted by death during a massive heart attack in which medics repeatedly “shocked” him back to life.

What Bob Hazel has learned from his journey is this: Knowing what you are prepared to give to, and expect from, your work and your life offers the reward of contentment, or at least acceptance. Hazel knows how to live with his blessings instead of his regrets.

“This isn’t a glorified job, it’s just a living,” says Hazel, gray-haired but still handsome, like the young slugger known as Hurricane Hazel who wore No. 12 for the Milwaukee Braves in 1957.

“Don’t get me wrong. I like my work, even though you tell some people you’re a whiskey salesman and they frown. It keeps me active and that I’ve got to be. I like selling. I like being around people. The money’s not great, but if your brands get hot, you can make a decent living. Pat and I don’t really need much to live on anyway.

“You know what’s hot now? Peach schnapps. I never saw so many sweet drinks around in my life. In my day, we drank for the feel. Now I guess the younger generation wants taste.”

Most of the privately owned liquor stores that stretch through the 700 miles Hazel travels every week are hardly bigger than a rabbit’s den. Outside, on one of the walls of a typical store, is painted a huge red dot--an identifying mark that goes back to the days when many people in these parts were illiterate. Inside, in a corner near a stuffed chair, a black-and-white television set is turned on to the game shows or soap operas, and over the cash register is a sign that reads “No Credit.”

A Man on Stage

Hazel knows every owner along the way. He knows their ailments, their spouses’s names, their favorite fishing holes, their golf handicaps. No matter what burdens he may be carrying that day, the moment he sets foot inside their store he is, like any salesman, a man on stage--smiling, relaxed, attentive, a friend of Southern charm come to visit.

“Why, Miss Marilyn,” he says, entering a shop, his eyes instinctively sweeping the shelves to check the placement of his brands, “you look better than you did last Tuesday, and I feel good about that because you had me downright worried after that cooking grease went and splattered your eyes.”

Marilyn Axson, a very large woman in a pink dress, is known around Simpsonville as Big Mama. She had been engrossed in a conversation about strawberry pies with two other liquor salesmen. “Well, I do feel better and thank you, Bob,” she said. “How’s the folks?” On the television set in the corner, an earnest young man is proposing: “People get second chances for a reason. All I know is that I love you more than I can say.”

Hazel takes Big Mama’s weekly order on a hand-held computer. He scribbles reminders to himself, noting what she may be running low on by next week. He reminds her of his discount on R&R;, a Canadian whisky that’s getting hot, and suggests she may need some more Red Rooster, the sweet, 42-proof “Wine for the 21st Century.”

Living With Pressure

On every brand he has a quota--a quota that the distilleries set for the distributors and the distributors demand of the salesmen. Meeting quotas translates into pressure and pressure means living with the constant threat of losing a brand if the salesman doesn’t produce.

Farther down the road, coming out of another store, Hazel gets back into his car, presses his hands to his forehead and closes his eyes. “Come on, Hazel,” he mutters to himself, “use your brain. Think this out.”

Asked if he has a headache, he says: “No, just thinking and relaxing. I’ve got to get an order from Benny in there, and he’s out tending to golf instead of tending to business. His clerk can’t order for him. Next Tuesday when I come through, I’m going to have to get here earlier and that’s going to mean missing a couple of stops in Greenwood and picking them up later so I can get in to see Benny before he gets on the course.”

Hazel drives slowly through Woodruff, the little town at the junction of routes 101 and 221 where he was reared. On the road he pays his own expenses. He has canceled his credit cards as a foolish temptation to spend unnecessarily, and he usually shuns motels in favor of spending nights in his territory with relatives and friends, particularly his pal, Don Buddin, who was the Boston Red Sox shortstop for five years and runs a whiskey store in Fountain Inn.

“If you look through the trees there,” Hazel says, “that’s my old high school. The practice field was just over the bank.” Nearby, the little weathered house on North Main Street that belonged to his parents is in need of painting and is for sale. Hazel wishes he could afford to buy it and fix it up, if only for old times’ sake.

‘Raised Six of Us’

“And over there, that’s where my mother and dad are buried,” he says, pointing to a small cemetery. “They raised six of us and, you know, I think they did a pretty good job.”

Back in the ‘40s, when Hazel was growing up in the Carolina hills, all the textile mills here had baseball teams. If you could hit or pitch, the mills would give you a summer job and ask you to do not much more than stroke hits or throw strikes.

Robert Sidney Hazel--6 feet tall, 190 pounds--could bang the ball clear to Greenville, and from the mill leagues he went on to play professionally in the minors. He was with the Wichita Braves that summer 30 years ago, an unknown journeyman with a bat and glove, when the Milwaukee Braves unexpectedly called him up in July, at an annual salary of $6,000, to spell Andy Pafko in right field.

“I promised myself one thing--that if I failed, it wasn’t going to be for not trying,” Hazel recalled.

Well, what Bob Hazel did to National League pitchers was roughly equivalent to what the tropical storm Hurricane Hazel had done to his South Carolina coastline in 1954--he destroyed what stood in his path. For eight fairy tale weeks, the Hurricane was the mightiest hitter in baseball, and for a fleeting moment he became what most men never achieve in an entire lifetime--he became an instant American hero of the first order.

Musial, Mantle and Williams

“I suppose he’ll cool off, but right now this kid is Musial, Mantle and Williams all wrapped in one,” the Braves’ second baseman, Red Schoendienst, said as the team drew close to the pennant.

Although his minor league credentials had been ordinary enough, Hazel came through in game after game with winning clutch hits for the Braves. He sprayed home runs and doubles all over Milwaukee County Stadium. He helped the Braves hold off the Dodgers and the Reds in the stretch with his bat--which was really a bat borrowed from Chuck Tanner--and he carried the Braves to the only world championship they would ever win in Milwaukee.

His batting average for that partial season he played was .403.

“I wasn’t doing anything different; it was just that everything was working for me. I didn’t want to wake up. Gosh, that was a good life.”

Hazel smiled faintly at the memory and pulled into another whiskey store, his 23rd stop of the day. “But I tell you the truth, once I left the game, I never thought about going back managing, coaching or whatever. What’s done is done. Besides, the way it ended, I left with kind of a bad taste in my mouth for baseball.”

The Braves’ general manager, John Quinn, had promised to reward Hazel with a bonus after the season, but when the bonus came it was what Hazel considered a miserly $1,000. The Hurricane mailed the check back, saying he needed the money, but not at the cost of his pride.

In 1958, Hazel was hit twice by beanballs--spending two weeks in a St. Louis hospital on one occasion--and then was traded to Detroit. He had differences with the manager, Bill Norman, and was exiled to the minors, where he spent two undistinguished seasons. At age 31, though he was convinced that he was still a major league ballplayer, he retired and came home to South Carolina.

“Everything went wrong and that was the end of it,” he said. “I told the wife it was time to wrap it up. Please appreciate, I’m not griping. I had my shot. It’s just that in the majors you have that vinegar, that intensity, that gives you strength, and in the minors I couldn’t get that pep back. Oh well. . . .”

Remarried 2 Years Later

Back home, Hazel sold granite for tombstones and monuments, then switched to selling whiskey. His wife died of cancer in 1970, and two years later he married Pat, an accountant. He calls her Mama affectionately and the two of them speak often of the fun they have had together over the last 15 years.

Their ranch-style house, on a cul de sac in Columbia, is full of laughter and friends--either theirs or those of their four grown children. There are always drinks available on the bar and as often as not, a barbecue being fired up on the porch near the swimming pool they had built last year. When it rains, Hazel does his grilling with an umbrella held over his head.

“People’ll say to me, ‘You played ball. You ought to be retired,’ ” said Hazel, who still gets fan letters and requests for autographs. “And I say, ‘Do you know what you’re talking about, fella? We didn’t make any money to amount to anything then. I got to work to pay the bills like anyone else.’ ”

Just before Thanksgiving, 1981, Hazel, who had never been sick a day in his life, was scheduled to overnight on his route in Greenville. Instead, feeling a strange stiffness in his chest, he drove home to Pat. They had a couple of drinks and a tuna fish salad, then Pat’s cousin took Hazel to a hospital. He smoked a cigarette in the emergency room. That night medics had to shock him back to life three times. Open heart surgery followed two months later.

“I woke up when I was having the attack and I couldn’t see any heartbeat on that machine I’m hooked up to,” Hazel said. “I thought, this is crazy, but I said, ‘Lord, here I am. Here’s Mr. Hazel.’ They called in Mary Webb, a chaplain. ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about me. I believe.’ ”

Exercised, Changed Diet

Hurricane Hazel, though, wasn’t about to go down on called strikes. After surgery, he walked his two miles a day, pacing the aisles of a local supermarket when it was raining, and later he practiced for an old timers’ game in Atlanta by making the 90-foot dash from an imaginary home plate to first base in his yard. Outside of limiting himself to two eggs a week, quitting smoking and giving up singles tennis in favor of doubles, Hazel has made few concessions to the encroachment of age or past illness.

“The surgery changed my values,” Hazel said, now back home from a two-day selling trip. “The first thing it taught me was the value of money, which is nothing. If you don’t have your health, what good is all the money in the world? All of a sudden Pat and me found we didn’t need all those things you’re always buying and saving for--isn’t that right, Mama?

“And I must say, I’m not the go-getter I was. I mean, I asked myself, what is this? You push yourself, all the time trying to meet quotas and get ahead, and you push yourself right into a heart attack. Well, I figure now, go ahead, do the best job you can. Take pride in what you’re doing. But don’t die for something that doesn’t really matter.”

Hazel plopped into a chair next to Pat, a glass of R&R; in hand, trying to get whiskey stores and quotas and brand names off his mind. His two daughters dropped by and his granddaughter gave him a kiss. Pat took rib-eye steaks out of the refrigerator. They freshened up their drinks and Hurricane Bob Hazel poked the coals on the grill and said that this--coming home, being home, staying home--was the grandest reward that work could offer.

“The Hurricane these days,” said Pat with a wink, “is really just a gentle breeze.”