Earle L. Fitz, the four-time mayor of Iowa Falls, Iowa, is unhappy about the current era. “It’s a self-serve age,” says Earle, shaking his head in discontent.
The other day his car needed air in the left-hand front tire. Earle pulled into a filling station, wearing his business suit and loathe to get out into the rain. But the attendant only pointed to the nearby air pump.
Even more recently Earle visited a restaurant. “The waitress told me to have a nice day,” he allows, “but she wasn’t even looking at me when she said it.”
Such shenanigans may get by in the gasoline or food business, Earle observes, but it’s no way to sell Bibles. He should know. For one thing, he is 81 years old and wise for it. For another thing, he is the founder and president of Riverside Book and Bible House, the world’s largest Bible distributor. Last year Riverside, a wholesaler, sold more than $33 million worth of Bibles—straight from its 100,000-square-foot plant in a prairie town with a population of 6,500.
Earle never ceases to be disappointed with poor service, as with the likes of the waitress and the gas station attendant, but he is not surprised. “I built my business by watching what other people do,” he sighs, “and not doing it.”
Earle started out, in the 1920s, as an elementary school teacher. One Christmas he asked his class of 23 children what Christmas was all about. “Santa Claus,” some said; and others, “We have lots to eat.” A single child mentioned the birth of Christ. At that point, Earle decided Christian education was an urgent necessity, and he began selling Bibles and study helps, at first in the summers, then full-time. He has been motivated by a simple philosophy from then to now: “The world would be a better place if every home knew the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments.”
It was not until 1962, when Earle was in his midfifties, that the John C. Winston Company (now of Holt, Rinehart, and Winston) decided it wanted out of the Bible business. Earle took early retirement. Back home in Iowa Falls, he poured much of his considerable energy into community involvement, serving as mayor in four successive terms, chairing the Chamber of Commerce, and establishing the Iowa Falls (Water) Ski Show, which has drawn up to 30,000 visitors to this river hamlet north of Des Moines.
But not all of Earle’s energy was spent at city hall.
Winston had 10,000 Bibles left over, which Earle bought and sold in a single winter. With that, Riverside Book and Bible House was born in the basement of Earle Fitz’s home, its president at an age slightly later than usual for the start of a second career.
In 1973 Riverside moved to its present plant, formerly a rope factory, a dance hall hosting such big band luminaries as Lawrence Welk and Stan Kenton, and—in the sixties—another kind of dancing establishment: The area now housing the Riverside credit department once held cages with go-go girls in them. As Earle sees it, “We turned a house of sin into a house of joy”
Clearly, Riverside is not typical. What other $30-million-a-year corporation reuses the boxes in which publishers mail it books? Or is heated mainly by a tank-furnace constructed by its vice-president and fueled by wooden shipping pallets?
“When you phone one of us answers,” Riverside’s catalog declares on its cover. “Our company is run by people, not by computers!”
Well, to be picky, there is one personal computer, used for advertising purposes. But that’s it. Earle is concerned that a computerized company, with all terminals connected to a single memory bank, might be paralyzed by a single malfunction. He prefers to rely on electronic typewriters. “If one breaks down, we have another in place inside two minutes,” he says.
It is a fact, as visitors can see for themselves by undertaking one of Earle’s somewhat famous “two-bit tours.” The tours begin in Earle’s element, amid 18 telephones ringing with orders from around the globe.
He wears a Harley-Davidson cap, having given up motorcycle riding only in recent years, and moves briskly from one desk to another, snatching up order forms. “Ada, Oklahoma—look at that! Calgary, Canada—unbelievable! San Francisco! New York! Here we are out in an Iowa cornfield, and they’re sending to us for books!”
And he is off. Charging ahead of his guests, pausing long enough to warn of ramps and stairs where visitors half-a-century younger might miss a step, Earle could just as well be leading a blitzkrieg as a tour. Ida Fitz, Riverside’s secretary-treasurer and Earle’s daughter-in-law, recalls a time when an employee, rushing to pass in front of an oncoming tour group, tripped on a telephone cord and sprawled across the floor. Oblivious to anything but the tour, Earle surged on, stepping over the fallen worker as if he were a log in the path.
Despite the apparent danger of death by stampede, employees do not seem overly threatened by the boss’s tours. He is “Earle” to forklift operators and sales managers alike. Employees dress in T-shirts, blue jeans, shorts, sandals—comfortably, in a word. And then there is Toto, a mutt who is jokingly referred to as the senior vice-president and often found lounging under a desk.
None of this to say that little work goes on inside Riverside. “Work works wonders,” Earle believes. On tour, he raptly admires the busy people packing books into boxes. “Everybody’s working, everybody’s happy,” he mutters in passing, as if the first condition is accompanied by the second as sure as rain follows thunder.
He is proud of how well the employees work. On a tour, he is likely to slow to an idle where two women extract mailing plates from indexed files, and declare they operate faster than computers.
“I can give these girls any order, from anywhere, and they’ll have the mailing plate inside five seconds. Watch.” He hands an order form to a woman; she glances at it, whips open one of the small cabinet drawers, and rifles through plates. Earle counts—“One, two, three”—uncoiling a finger with each number, and suddenly the employee yanks a plate, slaps it on the desk. Earle smiles. “She never breaks down, either.”
Reliability is Riverside’s trademark. In the busy Christmas and Easter seasons, telephone operators and salespeople will leave their desks and join the shipping lines, straining to meet Earle’s promise to his customers: The same day your order comes in, Riverside will ship the books out. Confronted by power-robbing midwestern blizzards, Riverside employees have been known to work in the dark, using flashlights and candles. In his eight years at Riverside, an employee can remember Earle’s promise failing only twice.
That might be hard for some gas station attendants and waitresses to appreciate, but Riverside’s dedicated consistency is why bookstore owners from Alaska to Texas find Earle Fitz’s motto—“Service! Service! Service!”—easy to remember.
By Rodney Clapp.
