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<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\nKrassen brags about his book\u2019s numbers. Since it was published in February 2019, he said, he\u2019s sold nearly 1,500 copies at $20 apiece.<\/p>\n
\u201cFind me a no-name, self-published author who sold more,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Krassen\u2019s second wife, Carole Cohn, said the point of the book wasn\u2019t for strangers to get to know him.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe just wants to sell the book,\u201d said Cohn, possibly her husband\u2019s biggest fan.<\/p>\n
Retirement to many people, she said, is a time for goals and hobbies that came second to raising a family.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe doesn\u2019t have that,\u201d she said. \u201cHe has this.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI do like when he\u2019s creative in his sales,\u201d she added. \u201cBut I do not like when he\u2019s pushy.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Krassen can be super pushy.<\/p>\n
Before the pandemic, he would thumb through the obituaries in the Sunday Inquirer, searching for familiar names. He\u2019d plug the names of next of kin into Google, and call their listed numbers. He\u2019d tell them about his 300-page tome, and the deceased\u2019s sometimes vague connection to it, and ask them to buy one.<\/p>\n
He would hand his business card to strangers at the movies, or to employees of high-end menswear stores, and ask them to buy his book. He\u2019s suggested that a car dealership hand out copies with every car they sell. He said he was temporarily kicked off Facebook for being too aggressive with his sales pitch on private pages.<\/p>\n
He found the phone extension for actor Kevin Bacon\u2019s brother, New York University professor Michael Bacon. Krassen reminded Bacon about his days playing in a jug band with Krassen\u2019s brother-in-law, Robert Levin, and suggested buying a book. Bacon mailed $20. Krassen said he met one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen at a funeral. The Philadelphia native has a copy.<\/p>\n
He calls each buyer a \u201cbreadcrumb.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI call them and try to motivate them to want to read it,\u201d Krassen said.<\/p>\n
Before the pandemic, he toured the region on his self-booked speaking tour in which he elbowed himself and his book onto community-events calendars.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all about growing up in Philadelphia,\u201d said Krassen, who now lives in Center City. “I\u2019m selling memories. I don\u2019t think [my life] is unusual. It was never, \u2018Look at me, I\u2019m wonderful.\u2019 I tried to represent one person growing up in a certain time, that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Krassen grew up in an Oxford Circle rowhouse. He attended Lincoln High School in Holmesburg and graduated in 1962 from the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Wharton School.<\/p>\n
His is a story about the lonely upbringing of an anxiety-ridden kid who measured himself in pickup basketball games. A story about an insurance salesman who married his first wife at a young age, who fathered three boys without a dream-career path, and who found himself as a provider without many options.<\/p>\n
In his 20s and early 30s, he was unsure of himself, having failed a personality test as part of a job application for a big insurance firm. He wasn\u2019t aggressive enough to succeed at the next level, they said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was intimidated by very successful people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Not anymore.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, just before Philadelphia was shut down by the pandemic, he spoke to a Jewish women\u2019s group in Somerton. They nibbled on black-and-white cookies and listened to him try to connect with their memories: names of middle-school teachers and long-closed stores.<\/p>\n
He attended S. Solis-Cohen Elementary School in Castor after its completion in 1948.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone know Solis-Cohen?\u201d Krassen asked. Hands went up.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first school I went to was Cornell,\u201d he said, referring to Laura H. Carnell Elementary School in Oxford Circle.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnybody go to Cornell?\u201d Hands went up.<\/p>\n
Krassen admonished some of the women for talking during his presentation, but they answered his questions and asked a few of their own.<\/p>\n
After his sales pitch, he sat at a folding table piled with books and black felt-tip pens.<\/p>\n
Attendee Lynne Kramer bought a book.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up in Oxford Circle, so I could relate to a lot of things that he was talking about,\u201d she said. \u201cI had similar incidents, but ordinarily I wouldn\u2019t have thought about that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
That day, he sold a total of six books, signing each with a variation of \u201cThanks for sharing my dream.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the pandemic, his book sales have slowed. He can\u2019t motivate people in person, and he\u2019s had mixed results with social media messages and cold calls.<\/p>\n
Still, this Philadelphian finds purpose in not so much sharing as selling his life story — day after day, striving to prove that his most ordinary journey has extraordinary value.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow,\u201d Krassen said, \u201cI\u2019ve got something to live for.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
(c)2020 The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/p>\n
Visit The Philadelphia Inquirer at www.inquirer.com<\/p>\n
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.<\/p>\n
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Read the original article at insurancenewsnet.com <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Philly.com Celebrities write memoirs. Interesting people tell their life stories. People like former President Barack Obama and actor Michael J. Fox, whose memoirs were released this month. But Richard Krassen? Krassen, who turns 80...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}