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Glory Days & maturity MILWAUKEE (MCT) — When the front door opens, he introduces him- self: "I'm your Fuller Brush man." Then: "Do you know what that is?" More than a century after Alfred Fuller founded the Fuller Brush Co. in 1906, fewer and fewer peo- ple do. These days, Count Fuller — he legally changed his name from Jeff Pergoli — can't assume homeowners will recognize the brand he calls the "Cadillac of cleaning prod- ucts." On a quiet summer afternoon in Whitefish Bay, Wis., Fuller trudges across lawns carrying in hand a Wooly Bully Fan Duster like a prophet's staff. Although he has sold company merchandise door-to-door for the last 30 years, he bears little resem- blance to the Fuller Brush salesmen in their 1950s heyday. Fuller, who is "sixty-something," wears short-sleeved shirts and shorts rather than suits; he hangs around his neck, in place of the iconic tie, a chain bearing a comb brush, a pair of collapsible scissors and a lucky rabbit's foot; and he carries his goods in a gym bag, not a suitcase, outfitted with cardboard dividers. For a brief time in the '80s, Fuller made his rounds in far more outlandish outfits. "When I was young, I wore a costume," he said. "But that didn't go over well." marketing strategies since. Still, the world around Fuller has changed more Fuller has tempered his Romney: than he has. The legion of Fuller Brush men in the greater Milwaukee area has dwin- dled to ranks in the single digits. Contractors are building fewer single-fami- ly homes in the suburbs and more downtown condos and apartment buildings, in which traveling salesmen are unwelcome. Women, whose mothers may have spent their days polishing the linoleum, are winning the bread with their hus- bands and leaving nannies to care for their children. Consumers, more con- cerned with price than sub- stance, are browsing dis- count store aisles or the Internet to find the house- hold items they need. And the Fuller Brush Co., whose overall yearly sales had reached nearly $100 million by the 1960s, is still reeling from filing bankruptcy in February. The company's troubles haven't much perturbed Fuller, who makes 300 to 500 retail sales in an aver- age week of part-time work. He doesn't mind knocking on as many as 20 doors to find one buyer, but the task of delivering orders the company backlogged while restructuring itself — now that was a waste of gas. Fuller believes firmly in the quality of his merchan- dise. When he makes a sale, he's often replacing items that customers bought decades ago from his Fuller Brush forbearers, "so they must last," he says. Fuller isn't a pushy salesman. When he demon- strates a glass gel cleaner on a retired pathologist's front door window, he doesn't MCT photo Count Fuller a door-to-door salesman of brushes, brooms and cleaning supplies makes a sales call on the Klenke family in Fox Point, Wis. tell the man the gel smells nice. He asks him whether it does. Fuller lives with the drudgery of his job — of lugging his bag from door to door, of leaving fliers when no one answers his knock or the doorbell, of listening to the same excus- WORLD BRIEFING promises SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — Republican presi- dential candidate Mitt Rom- ney claimed Friday that President Barack Obama has failed to fulfill his promises in part because he does not understand what it takes to ignite a more robust economic recovery. Obama failed to keep the CIA during the Cold War and were hailed as free- dom fighters. Clinton, whose advisers were of two minds about whether the designation was the right path, said in a state- ment Friday that the U.S. will ''also continue our robust campaign of diplo- matic, military and intelli- gence pressure on the net- work, demonstrating the United States' resolve to degrade the organization's ability to execute violent attacks.'' Resuming campaigning after a hiatus during the Democratic National Con- vention, Romney impugned Obama's competence, not his effort, the day after Obama accepted his party's nomination for president. ''This president tried, but he didn't understand what it takes to make our economy work. I do,'' Romney told 4,000 supporters at North- west College in Orange City, the heart of Iowa's GOP-heavy west. Entering the fall stretch high-profile attacks on U.S. and NATO troops, Congress insisted Clinton deliver a report on whether the Haqqanis should be desig- nated a terrorist organiza- tion and all of its members subjected to U.S. financial sanctions. Enraged by a string of Earthquakes to the Nov. 6 election, Rom- ney is concentrating on Obama's performance, according to aides, to counter what they say are negative depictions of the Republican in Obama cam- paign ads. Jobs report could cancel Obama ground states with painfully high levels of unemploy- ment. bounce WASHINGTON (AP) — The disappointing August jobs report raises yet another campaign obstacle for President Barack Obama and makes his hopes of holding onto his own job even more chal- lenging — especially in closely contested battle- Coming less than 12 hours after the president accepted his party's nomi- nation for a second term, the lackluster report could wipe out or diminish any tradi- tional bounce in the polls he might have gotten from the festive, well-choreographed three-day Democratic National Convention. ''The broad message here is flat, flat, flat,'' said economist Heidi Shierholz with the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Center. US declares Haqqanis — The Obama administra- tion declared Friday that the Pakistan-based Haqqani network of militants is a ter- rorist body despite misgiv- ings about how the largely symbolic act could further stall planned Afghan peace talks or put yet another chill on the United States' already fragile counterter- rorism alliance with Islam- abad. terrorists WASHINGTON (AP) Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's decision, signed Friday ahead of a Sunday deadline set by Congress, bans Americans from doing busi- ness with members of the group and blocks any assets it holds in the United States. The order, which will go into effect within 10 days, completes an odyssey of sorts for the Haqqanis from the days they partnered with earthquakes and a spate of aftershocks struck south- western China on Friday, toppling thousands of hous- es and sending boulders cascading across roads. At least 64 people were killed and hundreds injured in the remote mountainous area, and more than 100,000 resi- dents were evacuated. Damage was preventing rescuers from reaching out- lying towns, and communi- cations were disrupted after the midday quakes hit along the borders of Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, a rural region where some of China's poorest people live. The first 5.6-magnitude jolt SW China BEIJING (AP) — Twin es the uninterested give, of biting his tongue when a resentful homeowner chews him out — because he finds most human inter- lifestyles Fuller Brush salesman still knocking 100 years on action entertaining. "Being a door-to-door salesman, you learn how to deal with people, all ages, all types," including Mil- waukee Mayor Tom Bar- rett, he said. Fuller met the mayor when his wife bought a Fuller Brush kitchen broom and the company's bestselling dryer lint brush. Fuller's opinion: "He's a nice guy." After canvassing two blocks of houses on a recent afternoon, Fuller is keeping in shape but making no connections. At the first door on another street, a Michigan woman visiting family recognizes her old broom in Fuller's catalog. He runs to his Jeep and fetches a bubble gum pink "Sweep It Away Broom." "It'll last you your whole life," he promises. "Go sweep with it in the kitchen. Test it." She does and, when she agrees to buy it, Fuller notices her son peering out from behind her left leg. "What's your favorite color?" Fuller asks the boy. "Blue." Saturday, September 8, 2012 – Daily News 7A Fuller pulls one blue comb from his pocket, then more for the other children in the house. While the woman runs inside to find her checkbook, he tabulates her total in a receipt book, the old-fashioned way. "I can't believe this," the woman said, new broom in hand, "'cuz it was not that long ago that I was looking at my broom, going, 'It's looking a little rough. I could use a new one, but I don't know who sells this.'" but investors still wary ORLANDO, Fla. (MCT) — As Europe's debt crisis reached a boil earlier this year, John Began jettisoned his investments in stock funds with foreign holdings. The 77-year-old retiree, who lives in The Villages, Fla., said he no longer has the tolerance for investment risk he once had. So when major events such as the European Union crisis roil the world's equities markets, he takes action. Stock market on rebound, few months and won't get back in until, well, who knows?" he said. "Who knows what'll happen in 10 years? And my time horizon is different now — I don't have time to wait for the bounce-back. That's why I play defensively these days." "That's why I got out of foreign-stock funds in the last She'll never forget who the Fuller Brush man is. Despite the stock market's comeback from its 2007-09 slump — the Dow Jones industrial average is up 100 per- cent since its March 2009 low — investors old and young continue to move billions of dollars out of stock mutual funds and into what they hope are safer, if less lucrative, havens. Through early August, investors withdrew a net $65 bil- lion from domestic stock funds so far this year, a trend that, if it holds up, would result in a fifth straight year of cash out- flows, according to the Investment Company Institute, an industry trade group. for investors, with $5.6 trillion in assets as of June 30; still, investors have withdrawn more than $480 billion from U.S. stock funds since January 2008. Bond funds, meanwhile, have gained $800 billion, while stock-and-bond hybrid funds have gained $71 billion. The recession and financial crisis of the past five years Stock funds remain the dominant mutual fund of choice have chipped away at investor confidence in mutual funds generally. Nationwide, mutual-fund ownership slipped from 46 percent of all households to 44 percent during the same time period. It's natural, experts say, for older investors to shift their money from stocks to the perceived safety of bond funds, where it can generate interest income for their retirement years. That is partly the reason for the ongoing outflow of cash from stock funds, given the growing number of baby boomers who are retiring. quake struck just before 11:30 a.m. and was fol- lowed by an equally strong quake shortly after noon, joined by dozens of after- shocks. Though of moder- ate strength, the quakes were shallow. explain the flow of money out of stock funds, those experts say. A growing number of younger investors, for example, have also fled stocks, said Paul Gregg, a former corporate executive who teaches personal finance at the University of Central Florida. "The small investor is scared of Wall Street now," Gregg said. "The nanosecond, computerized trading going on there is just very intimidating. And then you have a firm like Knight Capital that almost goes bust because of a computer screw-up. The average investor has a hard time understand- ing this and dealing with the risk." Even though the stock market has regained nearly all of what it lost in 2007-09, investor confidence in stock funds continues to be undermined by ongoing economic uncer- tainty in the U.S. and around the world, said Charles Rot- blut, vice president of the American Association of Individ- ual Investors. But a jump in the number of retirees doesn't by itself