Some men just have the gift. It can’t be defined, certainly can’t be taught. If it could be bottled, it would sell for a fortune. The ones who can capitalize on it become rich. The ones who can capitalize on it and market it, change the world. Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison. These are names that everyone knows because they’ve had a direct impact on the world around them.

Does everyone know Tyrone Rex Phlegming? No. He doesn’t fit in with those titans of commerce. But his story is mildly interesting, nonetheless.

He started with Miller Brothers Creamery in Waterloo, Iowa, World War II having recently ended. America was full of hope, and housewives stayed home to raise the kids with a Chesterfield dangling from their Maybelline-painted lips and a milk box just outside the back door to the kitchen.

Waterloo was a town, like most others in the heartland of the midwest, that valued the ideals the nation was founded on and provided a healthy atmosphere to raise a family. Just the place where Tyrone and his new bride, Joan, thought would be perfect to put down roots and have kids. His sunny disposition, quick smile, and ability to crack a joke got Tyrone a job at the creamery. Seeing his name on the application, his boss quickly dubbed him T. Rex, and it stuck. Everyone in Waterloo knew T. Rex, those on his route looked forward to seeing him twice a week as he made deliveries of fresh milk and other dairy products to the back steps of their middle class homes.

Always faithful to Joan, she never had a reason to question his fidelity. But T. Rex also knew that a properly timed compliment, a subtle wink in the right direction, or even just getting caught giving a perfectly timed glance might result in an additional carton of sour cream or container of cottage cheese being checked off on next week’s order. All those ‘extras’ added up over time. Within three years T. Rex was the top man in dairy sales for Miller Brothers. Three more years after that, the General Manager of the creamery called him into his office.

“T. Rex,” he said, pulling out a long fat cigar and a sterling silver Zippo lighter displaying a Jersey cow with spots that looked like large dollar signs. He set fire to the end of the stogie and puffed billows of smoke, snapping the Zippo closed. “Your efforts here at Miller Brothers haven’t gone unnoticed. Top sales three years running. Outstanding growth year after year. A flawless reputation here in the community. They call you the King of Cottage Cheese in board room meetings!”

T. Rex sat back and glowed in the praise, knowing full well how every tribute was justified.

“It’s time your talents were put to better use,” he went on. “They’re being wasted on just the housewives on your route. We need you to teach your skills to all the other milkmen. We want you to be Sales Manager of all dairy products. We want you to be The Big Cheese. Take Miller Brothers to the next level. Maybe even help us expand into Nebraska. Uncharted territory.”

It was just the opportunity T. Rex had been hoping for. “I’ll take it!” He said without giving a thought to asking Joan about it, talking salary, or ironing out the myriad details that go with such an elevated position.

In the end, it was a perfect fit. T. Rex took to his new position like a catfish to the muddy shallows. Within a year there was a new Ford Country Sedan parked on the driveway of a two bedroom / one bath new frame home over on Howard Street, the perfect neighborhood for their two small boys, Dick and Steve, to play Kick-the-Can with other kids on the block. Joan busied herself sewing curtains for the new house in between Chesterfields and Tupperware gatherings with the other ladies on Howard Street. In no time, the new milkman who’d taken over for T. Rex was getting orders for extra cottage cheese and sour cream from Joan, not immune to the very charms he was being tutored in by T. Rex. Expensive dinners at The Total Bull, Waterloo’s best steak house, became common for the whole family.

For his part, T. Rex took Miller Brothers to new heights. His marketing campaign called “Treats from the Teats” became legendary. Partnering with Jell-O, cream cheese sales tripled when recipes for Lime Jell-O and Cream Cheese Salad were inserted in every milk box in Waterloo. Once each customer purchased their twentieth package of the heavily marked up cream cheese they were entitled to an aluminum Jell-O mold in the shape of an udder, a personal thank you note from T. Rex enclosed with it. The other hometown dairy had about as much chance of surviving in Waterloo as Napoleon. Within two years of T. Rex Phlegming taking over as Big Cheese, Miller Brothers was the only game in town.

The dairy business may be pasteurized, but it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Success like that the Miller Brothers Creamery was experiencing caught the attention of Juggs Jacobson, owner of Westward Ho Dairy Farms in Fort Stockton. Juggs reached out through back channels to T. Rex with an offer to come take over all the dairy operations of Westward Ho. He dangled the promise of near autonomous control of damn near everything but the herd itself, as well as stock options. Over the phone, Juggs touted the beauty and climate of Southwest Texas to clench the deal.

T. Rex, talking from a phone booth across the street from Miller Brothers to avoid detection, accepted without even consulting Joan, seeing dollar signs amongst the cactus of southwest Texas. Effects on the family be damned.

Joan was devastated. The thought of leaving her friends, the neighborhood, the congregation at Our Savior of Immense Proportions, not to mention saying goodbye to the new milkman, nearly devastated her. Young Dick took it particularly hard, just starting his first year of junior high at Warren G. Harding. Younger brother, Steve, was rarely seen other than at the dinner table, electing to spend most of his time in the bathroom with one of six or seven specially selected National Geographic magazines he kept under the bottom bunk of the room he shared with Dick.

Three weeks later, the house in Waterloo was sold to a young couple from Omaha, a Mayflower moving van had collected their belongings, and the Phlegming family headed south towards the Lone Star state. Kansas looked familiar. Oklahoma felt like they were entering a foreign country. Texas was like they’d landed on another planet. One that was hot as Hell.

“Maybe you should have come down and taken a look in person before accepting the position, Rex,” Joan said as she mopped up the sweat with a floral linen hanky that’d pooled around her pearl necklace. She eventually had to hold it out the window in the wind to attempt to dry it out.

T. Rex, chomping on a cigar the size of a Doberman dog turd, ignored the comment and told her to tell little Steve to get his hands out of his pants. “The kid’s gonna go blind before we hit Austin.” Dick, meanwhile, was creating pictures of things on his Etch-A-Sketch that would have caused expulsion at Warren G. Harding, back in Waterloo.

Of course, like most newcomers to Fort Stockton, the Phlegming family adjusted to the stifling heat, the rugged terrain, and the rampant racism that permeated the south in the fifties. They came to appreciate tacos, Dr. Pepper, the odd southern drawl, along with the expressions like “Bless your heart”, that sounded like one thing, but meant quite another. They were welcomed at Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern, and the boys were enrolled in its parochial school. In due course Sister Thelma set about counseling Dick about his drawings, eventually getting him to trade his Etch-A-Sketch for a Slinky and a Yo-Yo. Joan waited till Steve was away on a school field trip to the Old Pecos County Jail and confiscated his stash of National Geographic magazines, although by then he’d been forced to wear prescription eyewear.

True to his word, Juggs presented T. Rex with stock options, the first of which Rex cashed in for a down payment on a new three bedroom/two bath split-level in Road Runner Estates. Joan quickly made connections at the Klip-N-Dye. In no time she was sharing Chesterfields and margaritas with the coffee klatch there on Davy Crockett Court, embellishing stories about the milkman back in Waterloo and sharing her recipe for cream cheese and Lime Jell-O salad. “Don’t forget the diced up carrots and celery,” she told them. “It gives it just the right texture.”

For his part, T. Rex again was proving to be worth every penny Juggs was paying him. Westward Ho Dairy was recording record profits, thanks to Rex’s marketing campaign, “Milk the Ho for All It’s Worth”, encouraging sales of not just milk and cream, but cheese, butter, and assorted pickled products from Pecos Pickles. Westward Ho Dairy moved into Marfa, up to Odessa, and had plans to expand all the way to Amarillo, once Juggs had secured enough cattle out at the feedlot to keep up with demand. Fifty Divco trucks left Fort Stockton every morning before sunrise, spreading butter and cheese over West Texas like it was a piece of toast. Folks called it the “Ho Damn Fleet”.

Joan was at home with the gals from the Sewing Circle having margaritas while overseeing construction of the above ground pool in the back yard one summer afternoon in August of ‘59. She was in the middle of telling “the girls” how that young Kennedy kid from Massachusetts on the cover of LIFE magazine looked just like the milkman from Waterloo when the phone rang. It was T. Rex, calling from the office.

“Are you sitting down?” He said, his voice almost quivering.

“I’ve had three margaritas,” she said, lighting a new Chesterfield off the burning butt-end of the last one. “I couldn’t stand up if the place was on fire.”

“It’s the big leagues, Joan!” Rex shouted into the phone. “It’s the opportunity I’ve always dreamed about! CARNATION CALLED!”

“Car WHO?” Joan said, trying not to slur her words.

“CarNATION!” Rex replied. “The Big Boys. The biggest name in the whole damn dairy game. They want ME!”

“To do what?”

“To head up the whole damn Bon Bon Division. This is the Real Deal. Nationwide. A move to Los Angeles. CAL-I-FRICKIN-FORNIA! The title of President and more money than you’ve ever dreamed of!”

Joan was stunned. She’d grown to love Fort Stockton. She’d even gotten used to the heat when she discovered margaritas could be made frozen in the blender. She’d learned to appreciate the combined smell of the feedlot and oil fields as the summer sun baked the cracked, scorched earth. Trixie had talked her into dying her hair platinum blonde and piling it as high on her head as she could sculpt it; a look that had proven to have benefits with T. Rex in the bedroom, despite his freakishly small arms. Life was good. Dick had been entering Yo-Yo contests and cleaning up all over Pecos county and was headed for Regionals in Amarillo in the fall. Steve had started earning money mowing lawns in Road Runner Estates and spending time over at Mayor Goodman’s house learning about politics and business, and how profitable it could be when the two were meshed together.

“You didn’t give them an answer did you? Joan said, ash from the smoldering Chesterfield falling onto the pearls of her necklace and turning her neck as gray as her mood. The other gals in the room, sensing the tension, got up and wandered back to the sliding glass doors to the patio where they could get a better view of Rico and Rodrigo, both shirtless and shimmering in the afternoon heat, as they worked on the pool.

There was silence on the other end of the line as Joan clutched the handle set of the pink Princess phone. Joan waited for a reply. She took the Chesterfield out of her mouth and set it on the edge of the big amber colored glass Westward Ho ashtray in the middle of the Formica kitchen table.

“California,” he said. “Los Angeles. Seventy-four degrees year round instead of hotter than the gates of Hell. A presidency with Carnation,” Rex repeated each word slowly.

“You didn’t give them an answer, DID YOU?” She said through clenched teeth in a tone that would have startled the other women had Rodrigo not decided to douse himself with the garden hose by the corner of the house not thirty seconds earlier. They stood in stunned silence staring out into the back yard.

“Joanie,” T. Rex said in a slow, methodical, low, hushed voice. “They offered a brand new DeSoto Fireflite Hardtop as a company car.

Joan dropped her glass, frozen contentment spilling all over the floor. The other women women were so startled they nearly turned around.

“You told them yes, didn’t you?”