Larry Jewell

You're with Dixie's 890 KDXU in St. George, Utah. And as promised, on the telephone with me right now is Don Aslett. And Don, as we were discussing, I made a terrible statement. I said I actually ran into somebody I hadn't heard of. You now that's rare. Well, you know, my wife doesn't know what I do for a living yet, Larry. I tell her I clean service stations. But Larry, it's absolutely amazing. I've done over 4,000 media now in Australia and England and here in Canada, and my books have sold over a million books and still in my own hometown, you know, you go down to somebody from McCammon, Idaho, and you know, we're about a population of 670 and says, Don, who is he? Oh, he's a toilet cleaner, isn't he? Hardly anybody knows you. So it really, you know, I guess my most humbling experience was when after I started doing national television, I went down and did this big KGO in San Francisco and we showed them how to clean windows and we cleaned toilets and we, you know, we went through it all and we had a whole two minute, two six minute segments. And I mean, I'd done a show with Jane Fonda down there, so, you know, I thought, man. And I mean, I did two other shows and two radio shows that day and they were all big. And coming home that night, I was disappointed that the Nigerian cab driver didn't know who I was. So I said, well, I'm not going out in the streets because all these people probably mob me. And, you know, so I said, I think I'll just. I think this was my first meeting about seven years ago. I said, I think I'll just sneak out to the little Chinese restaurant, get some take home food and sneak back to my hotel. So I started walking down the street and nobody noticed me. So I took off my overcoat, nobody noticed me. I still had my mic on, you know, nobody noticed me. Finally I started doing little cleaning capers and nobody noticed me. And finally I got all the way back to the hotel and just as I was going in, some lady tugged on my arm and said, oh, you look like you had a tough day. Oh, yeah, all the tv, radio, lights, you know, I started going on and she says, do you want some company in your room tonight? And it just blew me away. That's all I attracted, with all my publicity with one lady of the street. And it really taught me a lesson, Larry, that no matter how much you, no matter how well you Think you're known. It takes years and years and a lot of toilets to clean, you know, before they know. And I picked up tons of nicknames as a cleaner. They called me in the south. They called me Billy Graham of the Pine Sole Set. They called me the Urinal Colonel. They call my wife Latrine Queen, Baron of the Biffy and Duke of the Dustpan. And all these things you pick up, you still, you still need to keep going. And that's the reason we're coming to St. George. We find out that we hit all towns that we can. When you get to New York, where I work a lot, people think the whole world, they think Wall street is Main street of the world. And you start finding out the real people live out in the Pocatello, Idaho's and the Cameron Wyomings and the St. George Utahs and the Hurricanes. And so that's what we found is we started doing a lot of publicity and a lot of seminar things. We go out in the small towns. I even did what. Is there a place called Panaka close to there? Panaka. Pinaka, is it? Pinaka, Nevada? Pinaka, Nevada. I remember somebody had me come up there about five years ago and do one. And I remember it was way, way I thought I lived out in a remote country in Idaho, but boy, that was really up in there. I guess closets got cluttered all around the. Oh, man, it's just remarkable how the same we are. My books are selling in England quite well. I've toured there. And they all want to know if Americans keep their house clean and everything else. But you know the big number one thing that everybody owns and that 40% of housework and house cleaning, Larry, is nothing but junk, litter and clutter. And everybody's trying to invent better formulas and buy better equipment. But boy, when you really look around, junk, litter and clutter cause more family fights, more argument, more divorce, more dissension than anything except finance. And it's just amazing. You go in the house and there's magazines stacked, old wallets and cars they haven't driven here, boots and shoes and newspapers and scout stuff. And that's what. And toys, kids, they've done a test. Children have 75% more toys than they need. And humans, us adults, have 25% more furniture than we need. And yet we keep buying more. And so you tell people, say, hey, I'll tell you how to reclean your house faster is just get rid of your junk. And really, Larry, commercially and at home, that it's so simple without buying Anything or reading anything or doing anything, just go home and get rid of the things. I mean, you have 400 pair of shoes in that closet. They're running out the door into the creek. You know, throw the ones you haven't worn for 40 years out. And you know, all those old expired calendars and those lottery tickets, you think they're going to be reviewed again, you know, and all that stuff, you know, toss that stuff and it's amazing what happens. How do you go about determining what is junk and what is valuable? Everybody has a different definition, don't they? Oh, they sure do. And the big thing is, is if it, if it doesn't enhance your life, you know, a teddy bear with two ears missing, if the kids love it, it's not junk or old letters from grandpa. But you could have an extra combine an extra Mercedes sitting in the drive that you don't need, that could be junk. So I have a little saying. Don't love anything, it can't love you back. And people, you know, people are finding out they, you know, it's like Larry was out thinking, people save a lifetime to have their set of china, you know, oh my God, my set of china. And then they finally get it. Are they going to feed their grandkids and their kids out of it? No, man, those little buggers will break it. So they keep. And I had to buy a china closet to fit it. And you know, we can't spend $1,000 to send our kid to the jamboree or put braces on their teeth. But we got these big things that we never use because everybody else has those big things that they never use. So you really gotta determine if it doesn't enhance your life, if the stuff doesn't enhance your life to do it. I held a junk contest in Phoenix, Arizona once. And boy, Larry, you. I said, I'm gonna give a free vacuum. You couldn't believe what these people brought down. I mean, one guy had a leopard skin covered water made into a chair. I love it. I mean, in fact, in my seminar down there Saturday, I'm gonna show you the winning prize. I can't tell it now, but we had one had beaver teeth. We had one lady kidney stones in a bottle. She'd had them 15 years. We had people with scraps. They had Puff the Magic Dragon in a parade 12 years ago. They didn't have, they didn't bring Puff, he was too good. They brought the scraps. And so you see all this stuff. In fact, Larry, the next time you go, any of you guys, anytime you drive past a garage of a house, having the garage, you look and it looked like the house just vomited. The next time you go by, you start looking at all that stuff. I was with an ABC radio person, the big people in Los Angeles, doing a show once, and went to her house, a television thing, to film. And she had one hiking boot. She'd gone up to the Himalayas someplace and one had fallen off and fallen down these crevasses, you know, I mean, like two miles down into the earth and you're not about to reach your boat to one boot because it cost her $80. I said, man, what are you saving? Well, I might lose a leg, you know, but junk is really the big thing. It takes a lot of time to clean. Uh, hu. Oh yeah. And it can run over you. I know that personally. See, everybody starts confessing. If we talk very long, you'd probably find that you have all of these things. I did a book called Clutter's Last Stand, and it's been one of my top sellers. The national news broadcaster of Washington D.C. i was doing a show with them and she said on her second, on her wedding, on her honeymoon, second night, her husband had come at 3 o' clock in the morning to get her out of the hot tub. She was in there laughing like she's crazy. She's reading Clutter's Last Stand. And he said, man, that doesn't say much for your marriage. And she said, that says a lot for the book. The thing is that we're all junkers at heart, like you, Larry. We all are everybody. And boy, you start coming up with stuff and once you start de junking, you quit buying it and you quit giving it. And then your life starts to go on values of good things instead of just plain old things. And it really makes a change in the seminars we do. We do a de junking segment and we put everybody on a real guilt trip, but everybody, they all recognize their junk. We have electric junk and we have gift junk. And it just helps clean house. It's just an easy way to learn to live with a family and live good, live cheaper and better. And even in a commercial building that we come down to clean, the first thing we do is get the junk off the floor and off the walls. And the stuff you don't really need, you can clean it a third faster. And now isn't the economy based on producing brand new junk? It really is. And that's, you know, that's, you know, we go on a trip, be good and daddy will bring you home some junk. And really, you know, it's the thing that doesn't make anybody happier no matter how much they get. And you know, if you use things, that's fine, but just to have things, it's like books. You know, a third of your libraries can be thrown out right now. And even though a writer, when I say that, people just flinch and roll over and play dead. But you know, there's 50,000 books a year Larry published. And these 50,000 books, there's probably, you know, 500 that are worth reading. But we get a book, it has a sacred thing. It's in the book, the good book, the library book. There's a sacred attachment with any book and we'll keep those things till we've got hundreds that we never read. And like magazines, you know, 70% of them are just advertisement. They update that every month. But it's really fun to do that. That's what we teaching people to clean nationally. You know, you teach people to clean and you teach them to get rid of their junk. It's such an easy way to improve like 30% and improve your marriage and your home and the kids improve. Is this to throw the junk out? Now before we go any further, I'd like to talk a little bit more about other things in addition to junk. But before we go any further, once again you'll be here in St. George where it isn't snowing, right? We're going to be Larry, we're doing this life after housework seminar that I've done nationally that's getting well known. We're coming down. We're going to be at the Four Seasons at the motel there. And we're doing one Saturday morning at 9 o' clock from 9 to 11:30, about 9 to 12 and we're doing one also that evening. Again, we're going to be there all day. We're going at 6:30 to about 9 and it's $5 to get in. And if you got a husband that won't come and you're handcuffed, we'll let him in free if he's handcuffed to you. And it's for, you know, in teenagers, but it's just a super evening of entertainment to help improve around life and around house and to clean. And then we're doing one Cedar. Any of you people up there that can hear us? We're doing one Friday night at 7 o' clock at Cedar City. So we're going to enjoy that. I used to clean down there a Lot. Larry, now, you mentioned when Bloomington was just getting underway, you were down the first golf course, the first building they built. We came down and I was cleaning. See, I worked for the phone company, my primary thing in college. And I started this cleaning business in 1957 as a student at Idaho State. We put in the paper and I'd never cleaned anything, man. The first call I got, the lady wanted me to shampoo her carpet. I hadn't even made a bed before, and I used boiling hot water on it, and it was a wool carpet and it shrunk it away from the wall. She thought she had a throw rug. Two weeks later, I killed a canary. I was using Lacroix and ammonia in a little sewing room. And I had a lot of bad experiences. But I hired one student. Two, 20, then 100. And we started this company called Varsity. And then we're in 11 states. We're one of the big companies nationally. And in the process of. We got a contract on the phone building in Cedar City. And so we cleaned Milford, Minersville, Panguitch, Hatch, Bryce, down to Kanab. And we went on these routes and worked for the phone company and also down in St. George. And of course, we'd always get sunstroke. We'd come out of Idaho where it was 32 below zero, and the next night be down there and the flowers, the cherries would be out. And I remember. You know, the thing I remember Larry, the most about Bloomington, it was just opening. We went there one day and this guy came screaming up out of this thing. He'd run into alligator. Did you ever hear about that? No. About 20 or 30 years ago, somebody previously had brought two alligators in the St. George area somewhere. And they'd broken out of the pen one night, like the sheep get out. And they hadn't seen him for years and years. And when Bloomington started developing, this guy, a gardener, somebody's walking down by the creek and out comes this 20 foot alligator. And just bombed the guy here he was in St. George, Utah, on an alligator. And I remember that we were down there when that happened. And that really impressed me. I never did know if they ever found that thing again. But you haven't heard about it yet? No. Somebody's liable to snap it right up, so to speak. It'll probably. It'll probably be down there. Bloomington is. We used to clean down there. And it's really. That's just a beautiful place. We have a place on Larry. We have a place in Kauai, a place in the Hawaiian Islands. We're building a maintenance free house. Now, one of the things to get rid of cleaning was to design it out. You know, you can prevent it, you can get help, and you can do everything else. But to design your house or design your building or even the home you live in, you can do so many things with paint and color and camouflage that you could cut like a half to 70% of housework out of your house. And when I first started doing that, I was hired professionally to help design buildings, to do this. And then my daughter got a degree in decorating interior design. And so a lot of housewives and homemakers, see, they really know what they want in a house. But men build houses. We don't listen to them. You know, the architects do it and the contractors. Everybody knows all the things. But the women that live in a house, they know exactly how it ought to be. And they say, hey, I want my sink this high on my cupboards. And everybody looks up and says, we're not gonna. That's weirdo ideas. Anyway, so I collected about 180,000 comment cards at the seminars I've done throughout the west. And I've got a lot from your area. And we ended up doing a book called make youe House. Do the Housework. Just the little tiny things that you can do to your house, the house you have right at home right now to make it maintenance free. Because you see, Larry, about 80% of the stuff in your house is what we call a rollover. Like your carpets, your drapes, your paint, your upholstery floor. A lot of these things, faucets, fixtures, a lot of these things in five or 10 years, we have to be replaced. We call them rollover. And this is where 80% of your housework time is taken. So the next time you replace carpets, instead of putting a yellow carpet or a white carpet, because, you know, it really looked good in the store, you'll say, listen, I got eight kids and two dogs with black hair. You kind of get one with gravy brown in it, butter yellow, carrot orange, you know, lettuce green. Match your menu. You spell a taco salad in the living room, and they never find it. You know, the dog could die in there and you wouldn't find him for a month. But there's so things that I've been taught at these seminars by the people that live in these houses. And you just start listening to the people that know. And boy, Larry, I mean. I mean, these people. See, the people that don't do housework really don't Know what it's about? The big problem with housework in our society is that 90% of it is caused by husbands and children, and 90% of the work is done by the woman. Now, that leads us to our next book, of which you graciously sent me a copy. And I do appreciate that. I did get with it, Larry. Yes, you did. I appreciate that appellation. It says, who sent. Says it's a woman's job to clean. And now there I showed that to Barbara Champion, who is here at the station, and the first thing she did is look at the COVID and says, I love him already. Well, you know, we're trying to solve that problem. When I started this out, I started out asking, you know, of course, most of the women would all come to my seminars because see the husband say, here, take $5. Go down there and learn how to clean this house. And while she's down there with big eyes trying to learn how to clean it, these guys are ripping it apart, not picking up their glasses, leaving their boots all over, you know, and cat fur and clippings from project. So the longer I got doing this, the longer I thought, you know, I'm not hitting the problem. That is not the problem. People know how to clean house. We're not doing anything to prevent it. So the fourth book we did was after Clutter's Last Stand. Writers said, let's do this. And so we did this book and it was an interesting thing. You know, I toured England and Australia with this book. And boy, the English are really stiff lipped about this. They. Boy, you don't want to tell them that an English man ought to clean. I mean, you know, that's the charged or that's the woman's duty to clean. I said, listen, you scabs, get your sleeves. Oh, it's her vacuum. It's her stove. It's her. You ever notice that everything. You ever noticed that, Larry? That everything that's cleaning is hers. And the longer you're married, the more you're liable to get those ladies as anniversary gifts. You know, they get telescope sites. So I've been teaching the ladies, and that's why the men better come to these seminars. Cause, boy, you know, I convince these ladies that they go home and they've got these men have got these $500 rifles shot once a year, $400 radar saws they haven't used. And you go to the woman, she's got this beat up old vacuum, you know, the dirt squirting out. This is electrocution to Plug it in. But once you start educating, men are better cleaners than women. Really. Now, hold everything. Hold everything. Let's go back through that statement one more time. There's a lot of women are going, oh, no. Women love this. I mean, you got to admit it. You can't fight the scriptures. You ask what the oldest profession is, and everybody says, well, it's prostitution. It is not before women were even invented. Read Genesis 2 and 15. It says the Lord told Adam to clean. Take care of the place is the biggest profession. It's the oldest in the world. And it was told to a man, not a woman. You know, we have men. See, men. Men think they're really smart. They have played the fumbling klutz caper. They say, when you change the baby, stick him with a pin and let the doo doo roll on the floor. And then the woman will say, get out of here, you clutch. But men are really good cleaners. They're fast. It's easier for them to reach above their head. It's easier for them to climb ladders because physically, the way they're constructed and they should do the cleaning. They can lift things, too. Oh, yeah. You know, it's amazing. But even being the world's number one cleaner. When I did this book, the one that I sent to you, Larry, When I did this book, I started looking at the things that I had been doing in my marriage. We raised six children, in fact, raised two extra. We raised eight. And I started looking at how unconscious I was of my wife. I never made the bed. I got up and I was a big wheel. I was on TV and I was a big cleaner. And I would send her to get things like, say, fetch. Female. And it never occurred to me how long it took to pick up something. When my kids all left home and I had to run my own errands and I started doing. I started to get up, and in two years, I have not missed one time that I have not made the bed. I used to never take my dishes. You know, I was raised in a farm where we left the dishes on the table and the women, you know, cleaned them up. Poor Mom. Boy, anybody comes to my house now, boy, they pick up. They make their own bed before they leave. I don't care if they're guests. If Ronald Reagan comes there, he's going to make his own bed, and he'd pick up his dish at the dinner table. And I just. There's just been a lot of injustices on and against the females for cleaning because we equate cleaning with them. And it really isn't so, you know, it's a real. You start getting into this profession, Larry, it's like broadcasting. There's just so many things can come out of it, and people haven't wanted to clean because everybody thinks it's the lowly, you know, it's the lowly image job of the world. And, you know, we're all over the world and we're just having so much fun. And you find it cleaning and painting. If you learn to do it right and learn to do it a little faster and get other people to help on it a little bit, do their share, and you're not picking up after other people, it's really pretty pleasant to do. Now, one of the. This is a little bit of personal testimonial. Couple of things things has happened in our family and probably is a direct result of your book. We made a purchase on a vacuum cleaner a while back, and I've noticed that in your book you say, go ahead and get the professional type, the good heavy duty professional type. It'll save you in the long run. So we did. And it works. You know, it's a simple thing. And that's, you know, that's one of the things I do in my seminar is introduce, just like for instance, clean floors. I had 600 people at Layton, Utah, once. I said, how do you clean this floor? And, you know, not one hand went out and somebody says, your hands and knees. Well, you know, you don't need one of these big floor machines or even these little ones. There's a little $18 tool called a doodle bug that we use professionally. It's on the end of a little thing on the end of a swivel. I can do a kitchen floor in about 10 minutes, scrub and wax and finish. And I mean, they did our church house floor one time. It took 47 hours with custodian a lot of people. My two sons and I went and did it in one hour. We were there one hour and we used one mop, bucket of water. It's just learning to use squeegees on your floor and a couple of tools, and they cost like nothing. You know, probably every professional tool you need to clean, you probably buy it for $80 or $90 total. And the vacuum cleaner that you talked about, the same way. There's some good vacuums out there, but my problem is most of them are really overpriced. And you can go down and I show the people the same vacuum that they're using in the motels right there through. All through St. George in that area. And the same vacuum that we're using, the foam buildings and that we use, you can buy that for about $240. It's an upright and it's got the long cord. It'll last you years and years and years and years. And they're just as good as the $900 ones. Nice. And I like the upright. But once you tell somebody that, there's no secret to this. It's just that people can see some of these things. It's like the windows. The same thing on those, Larry. You know, the window kits, a seven dollar window squeegee, one of the Etterase Taconis, which Italian squeegee, which you see everybody in the airports using, they're $7. They last the rest of your life. You can clean windows 80% faster. And the nice thing you do when you do clean windows, you don't ever use vinegar. I mean, vinegar is not a cleaner. If you think vinegar is a cleaner, you know, wash your. Or do your laundry with it. But you can use a drop of dishwashing soap. The people clean windows. Downtown Los Angeles, Las Vegas. You know what we use up these great big skyrises, see these big stages up on size buildings. That's my people up there. We use 47 cents worth of joy. You're kidding me. No, no. Because it makes the water sheet. Dishwashing soap is one of the most marvelous cleaners on the market today. And there's just a whole bunch of this stuff you see, like the Mary Ellen's helpful hint stuff that. I mean, housewives and homemaker, we're all smarter than that. They said, make your own brew, you know, make your own glue. Go get a cow, kill it, cut off its hoofs, grind them up in your osterizer. I mean, you can buy glue for $1.47, and you can buy cleaners for so cheap and they cost so little and they do so much, so 37 cents worth of joy will probably clean. Anyone listening will clean your house for the next 12 to 15 years and do it 80% faster and better if you just use a simple thing called a squeegee. And nobody can use those. But in the seminar we show people takes about 10 minutes. And I've had people come to those seminars that hated housework. They sit there and fun of me. The next time I saw them, they were driving a Mercedes and they said, don, we're in our own business. They had kids at home. They Were cleaning, they were making $25 an hour cleaning windows. And they were leaving at 9 o' clock after kids were in school and they come back at noon. They work three to four hours a day. And that's all we do is say, hey, it's easy to clean. And here's a few professional things. And just like your vacuum, it works. There's no secrets, Larry. You know, it's just common, old common sense and saying, here's what we're doing, here's some new things that are out. And there's a lot of brand new things. These new dust. Have you seen these dusters that like lambswool? They look like cotton candy. I haven't. No, I haven't. Well, you've seen cotton candy at a fair. Oh yeah, a two foot stick and there's this lambswool, Australian wool. And a lot of people have those that are listening right now. But you, that don't, you've seen those. But a feather duster, see, that just agitates the dust. It stirs it up a little. Yeah, yeah. And even a wet cloth, when you go across to the wet cloth, when it dries, the dust is still there. But these things and streaks like crazy. They kind of pick it up and they're like $4. And you can buy them locally in St. Geor, we used them for the last 10 years. We go down to Grand Canyon, Bryce and Zion every year, my company does. And before they open them up, we take those things and all our equipment, we go dust the beams and strip wax the floors. Then we leave. And then of course their regular cleaners come in. And so all these things we use that we're so fast with, you can buy for almost nothing. I mean, you notice my book Life After Housework has a list. Most of them you can buy right there in St. George and cheap. Yeah, I was just thumbing through the life after house and this is delightful. And so many little tricks of the trade. Now this must. You mentioned that you get feedback every once in a while. Quite a bit of feedback. You couldn't have picked up all of this all by yourself, could you? Well, you know, we have a little. When you do media, people write a lot of letters. Like a week ago I got one from Afghanistan and one from Jerusalem. Read that book you got in your hands. You're kidding me. No. You know, it's a funny thing even being a toilet cleaner, you know, cleaning is just something everyone's ignored and we've got. I know how homemakers feel, man. I've been cleaning toilets. I've had my head in the toilet for 31 years. You know, you're just kind of a scab of society. You know, you say, what are you doing Is I'm a homemaker. Everybody's head goes down. Oh, maybe too bad. Maybe in the next life you'll amount to something. But, you know, we have learned to make this funny and make it eloquent and say, hey, you know, it's the biggest, it's best. And so when this book came out, the Life After Houseware book you have, I self published this. I did it out of Salt Lake. I borrowed the money and put the book out and it sold well. So a company called Writer's Digest took it and it went on a best seller list, Larry. In fact, for 10 days, I was ahead of Joy of Sex and 30 days to a Beautiful Bottom. Boy, you get a cleaning book that can do that, you're kind of happy. Oh, yeah. So that book is now in seven languages, and it just went into German. And the Germans, of course, they didn't like the title. They said, the German intellect is too much for that title. So they titled it Polish with your brains. Let me tell you. Guess what country, Larry. Guess which country hasn't taken the book. Refused to take the book. I couldn't gu. One of the most progressive countries of production in the world, Japan. Japan. Yeah. They refuse to take the book. And when we ask them why, the guy says, ah, we don't want cleaning book. We don't want our women cleaning fast out on workforce. Let them stay home, clean, take a long time. And so I've had some, you know, you just get some. The Dutch have done the book, and the French, you gotta see what they did with it, man. You know, I've got. My stuff's pretty sterile. Boy, they got this real sexy chick on the front with a feather duster and the title. They changed it all out, Temptations of Cleaning. I mean, they really doctored it up. That made your book right to pg. 13. I don't know what you know, I don't know how they rated it, but it's been kind of fun. The Australians changed a little bit, and the English, they all change. And you got to watch them when they change the words, you know, the words mean a lot different. When I went to England, they said, now listen, Don, we have words over here in England that we don't use in America. And they told me nappies for diapers and all this. So I got on there Good Morning America. And the BBC over. I mean, like 10 million. You know how big a radio station that is? 10 million listeners. You know, in America, a big station is 250,000. Is a huge listener listening audience. Yes, right, 10 million. And they asked me, they told me that one word they didn't use in England was maternity.