Billy Mays Has Sold It All

The Washington Post:

A former high school football player, Billy Mays dropped out of West Virginia University and worked for his father’s hazardous-waste trucking company.

In 1983, he ran into a high school friend who was heading to Atlantic City to sell Ginsu knives on the boardwalk, then the pitchman capital of the United States. “He said, ‘I’m on my way to Atlantic City; want to come?’ ” Mays recalls. “I went home and grabbed my suitcase.”

He has done nothing but peddle miracle mops, chamois cloths, kitchen choppers and hundreds of other products ever since.

Mays worked for Cris Morris, the son of the company’s founder, and the first product he sold was WashMatik, a hose that could pump water from a bucket without being hooked up to a faucet. You could wash your car without being near your house.

“We called him Bucket Billy because he was doing demonstrations with a bucket for five or six years,” says Morris, on the phone from the Wisconsin State Fair, where he was setting up a handful of sales booths. “All the pitches he does on TV now are just like the ones he did in Atlantic City.”

He traveled around the country to home shows and state fairs, “ballying,” as the pitchman sales banter is known, at full volume for hours on end. Along the way, he met Max Appel, an inventor and pitchman who was selling Orange Glo, a wood-polishing liquid. When Appel asked Mays to pitch Orange Glo on the Home Shopping Network, 6,000 units were sold in 11 minutes, at $18 a pop.

“We would have sold more,” says Mays, “but they ran out.”

Photo by 1080thefan.

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